Beautiful and harrowing, angry and demanding, blistering yet hopeful, Svalbard’s When I Die Will I Get Better? is a triumph of creativity and authenticity. If you draw a Venn diagram of post-hardcore, shoegaze, and feminist treatise, this album would land smack dab in the center. It isn’t quite any of those things, but it is a brilliant album worth listening to this very instant.
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In the liner notes to They Don’t Sleep Anymore, the third full length from Chris Pandolfo, aka Clouds Collide, he concludes with “Unintentionally, It’s far and away the most personal album but I am confident it will find a way to connect to people.” That confidence is well-founded, because like his previous albums, and like so many pieces of art that deal with the intensely personal, those details impart a universal connectedness trivial generalities never could hope to attain.
It also helps that They Don’t Sleep Anymore is fantastic; far and away the best (in a series of great things) thing Clouds Collide have released. Continue reading
I can’t recall how I stumbled across the first single from Spotted Horse by Glassing, maybe a friend’s recommendation or a random Bandcamp find, but I do know that “Lobe” grabbed me instantly. Raw emotional anger is my catnip, one of the few things that laser focuses my attention, and that 1:47 packed a whole lot. Yet despite the in-your-face post-hardcore nature of the track, the album holds a secret: it’s actually a wonderfully complex post-rock album. Continue reading
Megaton Leviathan felt like a secret, something I discovered browsing through Bandcamp late one evening that none of my friends knew about. Funeral cosmic doom that embraced so many disparate elements to craft a forlorn style of music that spoke directly to the frightened receptors in my brain. After a sizable gap in time Mage has fallen to the cold, hard ground to remind me that buried in the dark is a lush sense of melody and decay. Continue reading
That’s right, folks…in a few short hours I will be on a plane and getting out of this god forsaken hell hole where it’s already stating to snow AGAIN and heading South for warmer climes, cooler waters, and copious amounts of alcohol – copious in this instance meaning maybe 1-2 drinks since I’m old and sleepy and my liver won’t stand for much more than that at this point.
But fear not! Our lovely editor has made sure I am not forgoing my Nine Circles duties, and has loaded me up with a ton of music to start digesting so when I get back I can get back to sharing what’s hot, what’s not, and what’ll curl your toes with glee or disgust (who am I to judge?). So for this edition of Nine Circles ov… I give you a purview of a few things on my radar over the next few weeks. Does this seem like a quick ploy to bang a column out before I leave for vacation? Sure! Does it matter? You be the judge! Continue reading
