Been a bit busy, so I haven’t been really ambitious on the
blog here, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been listening to the new music, or
at least some of it. So, I thought I might share my opinions on some of the
albums that came out last month.
Bat for Lashes: The Bride
Natasha Khan has returned to her Bat with Lashes project
after her work as the vocalist for Sexwitch with a more subdued, but highly
conceptual new effort. The Bride
follows the tale of the titular character as she deals with the grief and pain
of losing her husband to be on the day of their wedding to a car accident. She
goes on the honeymoon alone, and over time, learns how to deal with loss and
keep her lover’s memory with her. There are a lot of heavy emotions at play
here, and you really need to be in the right head space for it, but I enjoy it.
I’ve heard complaints that it’s not as dynamic as previous efforts, but I get
an “I’m too cried out and exhausted to even get out of bed” feel from some of
these performances, which definitely fits the mood and story in my opinion.
BadBadNotGood: IV
BadBadNotGood’s fourth full length definitely expands the
band’s horizons, adding to their jazz and hip hop sounds with some more
electronic elements, more saxophone (including a great appearance from Colin
Stetson), and even some chamber music kind of arrangements on tracks like ‘And
That, Too.’ with the woodwinds. I really
enjoyed the features on this album, and they didn’t feel at all tacked on,
which I can’t always say. They’re all very tastefully utilized, and add to the
feeling of the album. An album is pretty impressive when it’s kind of all over
the place sonically, but still manages to remain a more or less cohesive whole,
and BadBadNotGood manage to do this on IV.
Panopticon: Revisions of the Past
I normally don’t review re-masters, but for Revisions of the Past, I thought I might
make a bit of an exception. Austin Lunn
of Panopticon took it upon himself to remix and re-master some earlier Panopticon albums (On the Subject of Mortality and Social Disservices), as he was not happy
with the recording quality (a black metal artist worried about something
sounding good? Not kvlt bro.) All joking aside, the albums have a new lease on
life. The guitars on sharper, the vocals are more expansive, and the drumming
has a little bit more of a thud behind it, and the whole mix has a lot less of
a tinny, recorded in a hall closet sound to it, which for black metal elitists
may be a problem, but they’re probably not too huge on Panopticon fans anyway,
due to Lunn’s incorporation of bluegrass instrumentation on later efforts.
These albums are more straight atmospheric black metal than albums like Kentucky or Roads to the North, so fans who are new to these albums, you have
been warned.
So, those are a few of the albums I’ve been listening to
recently. What albums have you been getting into over the last month? What did
you think of these albums? As for me, I just got the download of the new of
Montreal album, Innocence Reaches
from the vinyl preorder, so I’m hoping to get to reviewing that soon, and we’ll
just have to see if the rumblings about Boys
Don’t Cry are true. See you later.
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