MUSIC

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The Last Rays and Skeleton Shadows: Best Late Fall Records

These are the days of odd shapes and acute angles. It’s not summery bliss anymore, now it’s wonder and melancholy. We wear our knit sweaters and drink steaming beverages, watching the air form from our breath with mild curiosity. The air is musty and half bitter with the smell of damp leaves on the ground- everything glitters either from a soft frost or the waning light. Those warm sunny days are over, and whatever you wanted to make happen in...

Sides of a New Artist and Tyler the Creator

How many cars can I buy till I run out of drive? How much drive can I have, until I run out of road? How much road can they pave, until I run out of land? How much land can it be until I run in the ocean? I don’t know if this is just me, or if there’s a whole camp of people out there who feel the same way, but I stop listening to an artist after their...

Double Bingo, Life in Music, and New Shoegaze

“Lady Daydream” by Mr Twin Sister. “Just because I’m losing, doesn’t make me a loser” When life hits us with the good, it happens a couple times over. That’s why people often say, “good things come in pairs”. Yet we all know there’s the flip side…..that when life hits us bad, it usually comes in a series of unfortunate events or circumstances. It’s one of those undeniable lessons in life that we learn for better or worse. One thing I...

Jog Jams: Songs that Make Me Forrest Gump

I’ve got a pretty extensive playlist on my IPod aptly labeled “Jogging”. It contains 314 songs clocking in at 20 hours and 38 minutes. That means I could jog for an extended period of time without hearing the same song multiple times. It also means that if I was to be so bold, I could jog continuously for 20 hours and 38 minutes just to experience the entirety of that playlist. That would be getting into absurd territory – nearing...

Get Your Shazam Ready, It’s ‘Master of None’

There are a few movies out there where I had my Shazam on standby at all times – it was just one great track after another. I remember just holding my phone in my hand the whole time, my finger hovering over that Shazam App waiting for the next song. In recent memory, there was Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007), which is probably his worst feature film yet features some of his best music choices. From that slow-burning movie I...

Schoolboy Q Builds the Bridge

They use to say that rap was divided between the East Coast and the West Coast. The styles were different, the influences split, and the feuds between the coastal camps all too real. The East was defined by jazz samples often laid under brash sprocket-style percussion and darker grittier beats. Boom-bap delivery and smooth jazz were belied by the added beats, which were often shrill and treble-heavy percussion added as contrasting elements. Good examples include Mobb Deep, NAS, or Wu-Tang...

Wicked Neat Music Videos: Fujiya & Miyagi

  Rounding out a litany of periodics I wanted to start is the music video segment. No I am not from the East Coast, however, I would like to gainfully adopt the upper Northeast’s use of the word “wicked” and combine it with my annoying habit of using old-timey adjectives like “neat” and “swell” or outdated phrases like “what in tarnations” and “golly gee willikers”. Let’s just call it a “niche vocabulary”. Speaking of a niche, the English band Fujiya...

Sonikseek: Diffuse Soul by Nick Hakim

The best Lyft rides are the ones where I get to my destination….obviously…. but also the ones where the driver is playing really good music. In Denver we have this amazing radio show on 102.3 FM called OpenAir, which my Lyft driver Justin was playing last night. OpenAir plays new music off the beaten path, indie music that can only be described as “niche” and “not radio typical”. By the time I arrived at the theater to see Alien: Covenant...