Album Reviews
The War on Drugs Tighten and Lighten Up on I Don’t Live Here Anymore
The War on Drugs makes big songs, meant for arena-scale rock reveries. In 2022, they’ll embark on a headlining tour at the biggest venues they’ve ever played (including Madison Square Garden), stepping onto stages that match the scope of their music. Yet the latest album from the six-piece led by Adam Granduciel, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, marks a turn towards directness and concision. Don’t worry! If you like The War on Drugs’ previous work, chances are you’ll like I Don’t Live Here Anymore, out Friday, October 29th. The band’s fifth LP and their first since 2017’s Grammy-winning A Deeper Understanding still showcases the group’s texture-rich, somehow-original revisions of the most-winning aspects of mid-’80s commercial rock. Each of the 10 tracks runs over four minutes, most hovering in ...
Lana Del Rey Meditates in an Emergency on Blue Banisters
“If this is the end, I want a boyfriend,” Lana Del Rey sings on “Black Bathing Suit,” one of the standout tracks on her eighth album, Blue Banisters. The pop balladeer has long mooned over romantic apocalypse, but with this collection, she gets to set explorations of doomed relationships against the backdrop of global crisis. At their best, Del Rey’s ruminations in an emergency extend her range on all levels — lyrics, vocals, dynamics, and candor. Throughout her prolific, decade-long career, Del Rey has leaned into nostalgic fantasy with a faded silver-screen sheen — writing Gatsby cosplay, tragic Hollywood heroine apologias, and references to the unhinged end of the 1960s that make it sound like it happened yesterday. (Didn’t it?) But on Blue Banisters, Del Rey weaves the relatable banal ...
Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres Is Completely Oblivious to Its Own Plight
On “Trouble In Town,” the third track on Coldplay’s 2019 LP Everyday Life, the band places a rather disturbing sound clip of a police officer rudely interrogating someone — this comes after Chris Martin’s solemn lament on unequal power structures and how they always “add more police,” and before a full-band psychedelic freak out of an outro, which is not necessarily what you’d associate with Coldplay. This was not an anomaly on the record; Everyday Life featured Coldplay at their most experimental, their most vital, and playing the riskiest music they’ve made in years. But what’s more, is that it sounded like Coldplay had changed, that over a span of 20 years as a band, they were almost more weathered and rugged. Fast forward to two years later; Coldplay have released their ninth studio al...
With Juno, Remi Wolf Signals That the Future of Pop Music Is Already Here
“Remi Wolf is a crazy bih but is also hella nice and sweet sometimes but also likes to yell at people but has figured out that maybe instead of yelling at people she can just sing.” This is the description that greets users who visit Remi Wolf’s official Spotify artist page. It’s not an inaccurate first impression for people who might be new to our October Artist of the Month, Remi Wolf. She’s arrived on the indie-pop scene in a neon and rainbow-drenched burst and has become something of a festival darling over the past year. Active social media users probably heard her track “Photo ID” on TikTok, but Wolf’s budding discography is much more than the viral hit may have suggested. Juno, her debut full-length album, is an odyssey through a world of oddities. In a recent interview with Consequ...
On A Beginner’s Mind, Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine Use Fiction as a Guide and a Salve
Sufjan Stevens is nothing if not prolific. The experimental artist has released a ton of albums over the past few years, each one a unique effort at navigating his emotional state and the state of the world at large. Almost one year ago to the date, Stevens released The Ascension, an expansion exploration into love, death, apocalypse and nationality. The Ascension was preceded by Aporia, a collaborative album with Stevens’s stepfather, Lowell Brams. Earlier this year, Stevens unleashed Convocations, a five-volume instrumental exploration of grief in the wake of the death of his biological father. We’ll do the math for you: A Beginner’s Mind marks Stevens’s fourth album in two years. This time, he’s collaborated with Californian Angelo De Augustine, who has an indie-folk style complementary...
Carcass’ Torn Arteries Is a Masterpiece of Bitterness: Review
The Lowdown: British death metal innovators Carcass helped found the genre in the ’80s and expand its boundaries in the early ’90s with a series of mostly-excellent and progressively different records, then broke up before getting their due. After a long hiatus they returned in 2013 with the platonically perfect Surgical Steel, maybe the best comeback album in all of metal and Heavy Consequence’s eighth-best metal album of the 2010s. Eight years later, their long-delayed follow-up, Torn Arteries, is harder to love than its predecessor, but still excellent. The Good: Carcass play to their strengths on Torn Arteries, chief among them guitarist Bill Steer’s potent balance of rhythmic chugging, saturated guitar tone, and speedy-but-bluesy melodic runs. These have been the focus of his sound si...
Iron Maiden Craft Their Most Diverse Album in Years with Senjutsu: Review
The Lowdown: Metal legends Iron Maiden were riding high prior to the pandemic. The band were in the midst of their “Legacy of the Beast Tour” — a career-spanning celebration of the band’s discography. The comprehensive setlist pulled from every era of Maiden — even the Blaze Bayley albums — hitting major highlights as well as obscure deep cuts. Somewhere in the middle of the jaunt, in early 2019, the band found time to hit the Guillaume Tell Studio in France to track the material that would become Senjutsu. Perhaps running through 40 years of songs every night worked as the ultimate songwriting stimulant, because Senjutsu is easily Iron Maiden’s most diverse work in years — no easy task for a band that continues to chiefly operate in a long-since-established heavy metal style. The Goo...
Kanye West Channels His Vulnerability on Donda, Delivering His Best Album in Years
Two of the most confounding words in music are “Kanye” and “West.” For the past few years, Kanye West has been less of an artist and more of a Rorschach test for a worldwide audience. To some, he’s a genius on par with John Lennon, Beethoven, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo Da Vinci. To others, he’s a drama king attracted to the spotlight like a moth to a flame. To a third group, he’s a fallen prophet who traded in his goodwill for a red cap and a White House hall pass. However you rate his flaws, Kanye admittedly never hid them, even all those moons ago when the world said he was hip hop’s Messiah in 2004. Seventeen years later, after dealing with the ups and downs that come from living one’s life in a fishbowl for the world to see, Ye is back with Donda, his tenth album. Named after his mother,...
Turnstile Gloriously Defy Genre Conventions on Glow On: Review
The Lowdown: After earning well-deserved buzz with their 2018 sophomore album, Time & Space, Baltimore’s Turnstile continue their sonic evolution on their new genre-defying effort, Glow On. It would be easy to just call Turnstile a hardcore band, but that only scratches the surface of the music that this adventurous quintet creates. The Good: Fans of Turnstile’s hardcore roots are treated to their fair share of heavy tracks on Glow On, but those songs are balanced with melodic alt-rock tunes that shine just as brightly. A handful of the songs on Glow On also appeared on the Turnstile Love Connection EP that preceded the full-length by two months, one of which is the infectious leadoff track “Mystery.” A candidate for best rock song of the year, “Mystery” roars with a Nirvana-like guita...
Big Red Machine’s How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? Brings Late Summer Melancholy
On their sophomore outing as Big Red Machine, Aaron Dessner (The National) and Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) take their time. The end of August is here — much like last year’s folklore, an album with writing and production contributions from both artists, this period has arrived with an album that revels in the dog days of summer. Bon Iver and The National are two acts that followed similar timelines during their respective ascents within the indie rock world. (Perhaps the best way to contextualize their initial connection is with the reminder that Dessner and Vernon first became friends over MySpace.) There’s a gentleness associated with their music, both from their individual endeavors and from work together, and How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? fits that same bill, bobbing steadily ove...
With If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, Halsey Crafts Her Own Mythology
When Halsey shared the artwork for her fourth studio album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, the inspiration was clear: seated on a throne, confidently exposed with a child in her arms, she is the regal image of the Madonna. Halsey (who goes by the pronouns “she/they”) has always seemed fascinated by the stories that make up humanity, from the mythic to the biblical and fantastical. If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is the next chapter in her own tale. This marks the fourth studio album for Halsey, who is on the cusp of turning 27 — her debut LP, Badlands, shot the singer into the spotlight when she was just 20 years old. Her bracing honesty and electronic production helped her cultivate a dedicated following of young adults, many of whom have grown with her in the years since that deb...
Meet Me @ the Altar Rewrite the Handbook on Easycore and Pop-Punk With Model Citizen EP
Pop-punk is having its time in the sun once again, as different iterations of the genre swim around the Billboard Hot 100 and streaming charts. This time, though, a new class of pop stars and rappers are taking the reins. While the genre itself has never disappeared completely from the mainstream, very few pop-punk groups have held onto their roots and excelled throughout the last ten years. Before the relatively short days of Lil Peep and Juice WRLD’s bursts of emo-inflected rap across radio stations and online publications, pop-punk had, for many, become a symbol of a dying era — it was a genre to be defended to some, and a genre to be forgotten to others. Enter Consequence’s August Artist of the Month Meet Me @ the Altar, a trio who found each other on the internet and bonded over their...
