February 2012
1 post
The minor fall and the major lift, from one lazy...
Leonard Cohen exists in a rarified pantheon of living artists. He is a man who has seen his own work and personal mythos effloresce into the eminence of legend, a poet laureate of the sacred and profane, beautitude and lust, wordly wisdom and the nexus between spiritual transcendence and earthly prurience. For my part I can make that cliched assertion that I recall with lucid...
December 2011
1 post
The Babenzele 25 essential post-90s hip-hop...
11) Count Bass D “Dwight Spitz”
Count Bass D was a multi-instrumentalist jazz artist before a hip-hop musician, and it shows in his warm and subtly complex production; beautifully truncated samples are swaddled in layers of live instrumentation, golden aged hip-hop boom-bap is complimented with intelligent chord progressions and a refined, stately sonic pallette....
November 2011
3 posts
Kate Bush's long, beautiful winter of the soul.
Kate Bush’s newest album “50 Words for Snow”, her first in six years and only second in the last seventeen, is an elegiac, deliberately crafted, hauntingly beautiful suite of seven songs thematically constructed around the ephemeral, ghostly spirit of wintertime; an album of icy calm and quiescent warmth, frailty and august strength. The record begins with...
The Babenzele 25 Essential Post-90s Hip-Hop...
I’ve set myself to the task of compiling my personal list of “essential” hip-hop albums released from the year 2000 and beyond; obviously what qualifies an album for inclusion is entirely subjective. I’ve tried to choose records which I like and also have some uniquely innovative character or cultural influence, but mostly it’s just those that I personally prefer...
October 2011
3 posts
Odd Future descends on First Avenue
The first thing that struck me upon arriving at First Avenue on the night of the Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (a.k.a. OFWGKTA, a.k.a. Odd Future) show was the crowd: I was, at least at the early hour that I came to claim my ticket, one of the oldest people present. In a way this makes sense, though it still initially startled me; Odd Future are very young, and create music...
Das Racist, the neo-rap Zack Attack
Most every discussion about rap trio Das Racist revolves around the question, “how seriously are we supposed to take these guys?”, with the consensus seeming to be, “you’re not supposed to know”. The smart-ass, liberal arts college educated Brooklynites first caught some internet fame after releasing two freewheeling, hyper-referential mixtapes full of...
Swans, and music as sonic viscera; otherwise...
An appropriately portentous atmosphere pervaded Minneapolis in the hours preceding Swans arrival at the stage of First Avenue. Foreboding black clouds seemingly heaving with the threat of some brute storm scarcely contained blotted the dusk; an anxious dread writ large through elemental forces. Anxious dread is an operative component of Swans’ hostile sonic assault, and in the live...
