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Lotus Plaza – The Floodlight Collective

March 17th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Album reviews

A side project by Deerhunter guitarist Lockett Pundt, Lotus Plaza’s debut bears a marked resemblance to that band at first listen – a lot of shoegazey guitar work and floating, sometimes inaudible vocals – but the sonic textures here are more insistent in their dreaminess (the title track is an Eno-caliber instrumental build-up), the melodies are filled with an unexpected reverence for pop of the 50s and 60s; not necessarily better than Deerhunter, but far more focused.

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Handsome Furs – Face Control

March 9th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Album reviews

Wolf Parader Dan Boeckner and wife Alexei Perry’s follow-up to 2007′s Plague Park is soaked in New Order-style 80′s pop, along with a healthy dose of guitar and Boeckner’s distinctively swaggering vocal style, it’s hookier and more immediately enjoyable than his Wolf Parade work and far more memorable and impressive than Plague Park but it’s style of synths and drum machines certainly isn’t going to be anything you haven’t heard before.

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Beirut – March of the Zapotec/Holland

February 10th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Album reviews

Beirut’s newest release is a series of two EPs: the first is a waltzy, brass-driven affair that feels like the mournful soundtrack to a funeral in some Mexican village; Holland demonstrates the true extent to which Zach Condon can stretch his talents, with a collection of bubbly electronic tracks on which he sounds far from uncomfortable.

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Bon Iver – Blood Bank

January 23rd, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Album reviews

Bon Iver’s first EP sees Justin Vernon out of his cabin in the woods and accompanied by a band but making similarly soulful and masterfully written tunes (the title track in particular), all be it with a more polished sound and less charm, something we’ll probably all have to get used to unless he decides to take another extended camping trip in the near future.

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Antony and the Johnsons – The Crying Light

January 19th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Album reviews

Antony and the Johnson’s newest LP is musically not too dissimilar from 2005′s I Am a Bird Now – greeting the listener with sparse and lovely instrumentation and Antony Hegarty’s uniquely soul-shaking voice – but the lyrical focus has shifted from Hegarty’s inner-self to the natural world, without losing the massive emotional weight of his previous work, particularly on medatative album highlights like “Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground” and the deathbed ballad “Another World”.

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A.C. Newman – Get Guilty

January 9th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Album reviews

A.C. Newman of The New Pornographers has more than proven that he knows pop music and he knows how to write the hell out of it, and Get Guilty will not surprise anyone who’s heard the Pornographers or Newman’s first solo album, but that’s exactly the problem: as comforting as his brand of efficiently catchy, guitar and piano driven songs are, one wonders when – after eight years of this kind of thing – he’s going to try something new.

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