I’m heading out of town tonight, on a red eye for a series of meetings this week. This is my first flight out of San Francisco in a few months. Since I was last here, someone got the bright idea of setting up a mini exhibit that speaks to the region’s important cultural art movements. See the rest here
★★★☆ While perhaps not as bold a transition as the ones we heard going into the band’s last two albums, this is nevertheless a fully-realized and utterly different take on prog metal, more “Coal” than “Bilateral” but with hints of both. Einar Solberg’s vocals take on more of a prominent role here, but the rest of the band are also tireless in their performances. See the rest here
★★☆☆ I give this band props for keeping “On Lonely Towers” interesting, in an Opeth-meets-Alestorm kind of rollicking way. But my god, the clean vocals are so jarring and distracting. Unfortunately, they’re the clearest part of the mix. Also, the songs tend to feel overlong and belabored. See the rest here
★☆☆☆ There’s nothing technically bad about this album, but it feels like a big slab of so-what. None of it is memorable — not the guitars, nor the drums, nor the vocals, nor the songwriting. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This is like a more punk, more grind version of Entombed. It’s dirty as all get out, and some of the riffs approach neoclassical status. But there’s also a plodding that comes across as tiredness, and it plagues almost every song past the opening track. See the rest here
★★★☆ Not a lot of surprises here (but that’s not really what we want from an FNM album); there’s a little more room here for atmosphere and dynamics, but otherwise this feels like a proper spiritual successor to “Album Of The Year.” The songs range from exceptional (“Cone Of Shame”) to regrettable (“Motherfucker”), but on the whole, this is an entertaining album. See the rest here
I wouldn’t know — I have never sat down and given a serious listen to anything after “Union” (although I’ve certainly tried to!) See the rest here
On a related note: over at Stereogum, a columnist just spent what must have been a ludicrous amount of time listening to every Yes album, and then ranking them from worst to best. It’s hard to argue with his choices. See the rest here
I just found out that Chris Squire has been diagnosed with leukemia, and will be sitting out a Yes tour for the first time in the band’s history. All necessary asterisks related to the “band”‘s singular history are assumed. More info here. See the rest here
★★★☆ A meaty, albeit nu-metalish and slickly overproduced, post-djent bouillabaisse (with definite nods to Periphery, Chimp Spanner, et al). But what it lacks in originality per se, this album more than makes up for with a doubled-down commitment to all the tropes that make this microgenre so great: feminine subject matter, pseudorandom switching between clean singing and incoherent screaming, and above all, spasmodic aggression. See the rest here
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