I’ve long been drawn to post-rock that excels at contrast. It is a genre which at times is stereotyped as music specific for certain moods, scenarios or situations. While there is obvious truth to its effectiveness at those, numerous bands are able to bring out a wide spectrum of emotional…
Though it’s tempting to claim we’ve reached the pinnacle of genre splicing and experimentation, the inherent nature of music makes this process inevitable and ongoing. Music will only become more innovative as more bands create and contort existing genres. Naturally, styles once considered experimental will eventually become staple genres, only…
It’s cool that Four Year Strong are (finally) back. More than that, there just seems to be an effusively buoyant attitude surrounding this return for the genre-bending melodic hardcore band. While they started their career more firmly entrenched in a sort of rebirth of what pop punk could be, on…
Reviewing music adds a unique element to retrospection. While everyone reflects on their past opinions, revisiting a detailed analysis of an album frames that type of reflection in a much more formal way. It’s the difference between a casual remembrance of past feelings and revisiting several paragraphs of your opinion…
In their groundbreaking work, A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari defined the rhizome as an alternate model for thought and political analysis. In their words: We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture…
Drama. It’s one of those things that, in the context of metal or extreme music, often feels clichéd like some sad self-parody, or just hackneyed and predictable. Things like the demonstrative highs and lows of symphonic or power metal and the cinematic tension of post-metal immediately come to mind, but…
A couple years back, bay area doom trio Brume caught some ears with their fantastic debut LP, Rooster. The Billy Anderson-produced effort put them on doomsters’ radars with an enjoyably dark, psychedelia-tinged brand of slow and low. Since then, few records have seemed to zero in on the unique concoction…
For the past two years, Post. Festival has emerged as the best weekend of the year for a re-energized American post-rock scene and transformed Indianapolis into the unlikely beating heart of this small but dedicated musical community. It’s fitting though, seeing as Indy’s own PILLARS have positioned themselves at the…
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…
Normally, lately, when I’m discussing the great music scene that Toronto has going on it’s to talk on and on about the tremendous well-spring of punk music that it has become. As with any scene hitting a creative spike, though, there are great things happening in that town across multiple…
