There’s a type of victory in sports called a “wire-to-wire” win, where one team holds the lead throughout the entire game. Instead of both teams tying and trading leads multiple times or one side staging an epic comeback, the winner dominates the match from start to finish and quells any…
Collaborations are the ultimate musical wild card, offering up either a pleasant surprise or unfulfilled potential. Fortunately for us, both Justin Broadrick (Godflesh and Jesu) and Kevin Martin (The Bug) have made it their mission to form some of the most intriguing super-duos over the past decade. Broadrick has worked…
Uniqueness is often conflated with interesting ideas in our modern music consumption landscape. There’s plenty of experimental music that, while undeniably different, is pretty deniably good. I’ve encountered albums of all-acoustic black metal and blackened trip-hop on my travels, both of which defied the norms of their genres but were…
Short bursts of off-kilter aggression have yet to go out of style for me. As much as I’ve gravitated toward longer and more complex music, I still periodically revisit my high school affinity for the ’00s mathgrind and noisecore scene. I was addicted to bands like An Albatross, iwrestledabearonce, and…
There’s been much written about both the quality of vinyl and the lack thereof. I’m not interested in wading into the fidelity wars, but I do want to cite a recent “
Though I have no first-hand experience with this, my sense is that it’s more difficult for women and members of the LGBTQ+ to break into the relative mainstream of experimental music. Sure, you could argue that people with an affinity for “outsider” art would naturally be more inclined to accept…
Up to this point, Jute Gyte has made an almost annual tradition of releasing the boldest black metal album of the year. With this project, multi-instrumentalist Adam Kalmbach has channeled the black metal blueprint through classical composition techniques—microtonality and serialism, primarily—and paired the results with elements of dark ambient, industrial,…
That title, coming from this band, is honestly terrifying. We’re still reeling from Howling Sycamore’s debut release, a supergroup comprised of some of death metal’s best and making a weird type of avant-garde progressive metal, and here they stand before us with a promise of annihilation. Interestingly enough, Seven Pathways…
Sometimes music critics can benefit from adhering to the notion that “form follows function.” It’s an abstract use of the bauhaus principle, but one which feels especially relevant in the modern music landscape. We often slather genre tags on scenes and artists that are growing more and more stylistically agnostic,…
One of the fastest ways to a music critic’s heart is a seamless synthesis of styles. Anytime a group successfully blends adjacent or dissimilar genres, the results can push boundaries with a truly engaging, unique listen. Such is the case with Ache Pillars, the latest EP from one-person band Folian.…
