“Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink,” Coleridge’s sailor complains in the famous 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The mariner is talking about the plight on his ship, but he may as well be describing the city of New York. That year, a yellow fever epidemic led to an outcry over […]
Tag: New York
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Former Oshwa bandleader Alicia Walter makes a grand entrance as a solo artist
In the 2010s, Alicia Walter led criminally underappreciated Chicago band Oshwa, who played dizzying, dramatic math-rock with the finesse of a tween Mensa member simultaneously solving three Rubik’s Cubes. Walter moved to New York in 2016, the same year Oshwa released their final album, I We You Me, but her Chicago connections remain strong: this […]
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Fotocrime and the Austerity Program explore two points on the electronic-music-meets-rock spectrum
On the Jesus Lizard’s 1989 debut EP, Pure, the noise-rock institution were still figuring things out. Working as a trio, the band hadn’t yet discovered their distinctive mutant swing, instead suspending the metallic scrape and twang of their guitars in the flat, mechanical rhythms of a primitive drum machine. But drummer Mac McNeilly joined the […]
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Torres writes big happy rock love songs for the end of lockdown
Brooklyn singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott, aka Torres, is a master of insular, languid indie pop. But after making it through lockdown and finding inspiration in her partner, visual artist Jenna Gribbon, Scott is in an expansive mood. Her new album, Thirstier (Merge), graced with a glam cock-rock cover painted by Gribbon, features a big, snarling, exuberant […]
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Chicago indie rockers Izzy True find comfort in Our Beautiful Baby World
Izzy Reidy specializes in the kind of intimate indie rock where you can hear the sound of fingertips squeaking along guitar strings. They launched their band, Izzy True, while living in upstate New York, but these days Reidy lives in Chicago and plays with drummer Sam Goldstein and multi-instrumentalist Curtis Oren. Izzy True’s new third […]
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L’Rain creates glittering, warped pop collages on Fatigue
Brooklyn composer and multi-instrumentalist Taja Cheek, aka L’Rain, has titled her sophomore album Fatigue (Mexican Summer), but she doesn’t sound tired. Her aesthetic is languidly manic, with an eclectic mix of genres and moods bobbing in and out of her layered, psychedelic orchestral pop. Opener “Fly, Die,” kicks off with washes of voices and instrumental […]
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Genghis Tron reunite and shift gears on Dream Weapon
In a 2020 filled with unwanted surprises, one bright spot was the unexpected reunion of experimental metal group Genghis Tron after a self-described “indefinite” hiatus. Dream Weapon, the New York-based band’s first album in 13 years, departs from the sound of their earlier records in a way that may startle the group’s patient fans, but […]
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Patricia Brennan makes delicate music for mallets
When used in the improvisatory style pioneered by performers such as Lionel Hampton, the vibraphone is traditionally a clanging, percussive, hard-charging instrument. The marimba is arguably best known for providing the hip-shaking backbone for many traditional Latin musics. New York composer Patricia Brennan takes both instruments in more delicate and less sweaty directions. Her debut […]
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White Suns merge harsh noise experiments and punk rhythms on The Lower Way
Over the past dozen years, White Suns have created a perfect marriage of folding-table harsh noise and streamlined punk, and the New York trio’s latest full-length, The Lower Way (their first for Decoherence Records), asserts their hybrid style more strongly than ever. By layering assaultive electronics, circuit-bent synths, atonal prepared guitars, fried stomp boxes, musique […]
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Megalophobe offers drones for mourning on Music for Resistance Fantasies
Though it came out in mid-December, too late to make most “best of 2020” lists, Megalophobe’s Music for Resistance Fantasies (Nefarious Industries) deserves to be remembered as one of the most iconic and painfully lovely summations of the year. Megalophobe is the New York-based solo project of Benjamin Levitt, and he recorded the album to […]
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Live Skull combine new songs with a resurrected 1989 Peel Session on Dangerous Visions
Few recordings transport me directly to a time and place like Dusted, the 1987 album by foundational New York noise-rock band Live Skull. Founded in 1982 by guitarists Tom Paine and Mark C., Live Skull were a buzz saw of guitar-led postpunk that combined art-rocker sensibilities with leather-jacket sneer, almost perfectly encapsulating the early-80s Lower […]
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Dezron Douglas and Brandee Younger address cultural issues from lockdown on Force Majeure
For the past few months, bassist Dezron Douglas and harpist Brandee Younger have dealt with the necessity of social distancing with their own kind of intimate gigs: a series of quietly uplifting performances streamed live through a shared microphone from their Manhattan apartment. Force Majeure collects a dozen of these songs along with brief, perceptive […]
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Papo Vázquez leads his Mighty Pirate Troubadours through an uplifting blend of jazz and Caribbean rhythms
Trombonist Papo Vázquez had plenty of reasons to feel reflective this past spring. He was about to record Breaking Cover, his tenth album under his own name, and he’d spent more than 40 years performing with some of New York’s top Latin ensembles, among them Jerry Gonzalez’s Fort Apache Band and the Fania All-Stars. The […]
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Composer William Basinski combs four decades of his personal archives to build something new on Lamentations
William Basinski has thrown himself headlong into the kind of “productive quarantine” that seems like a myth to most of us, and the spoils are abundant. Since March, when states across the U.S. began issuing stay-at-home orders, he has unveiled a collaboration with sound artist Richard Chartier and a new project called Sparkle Division. The […]