Nowhere Faster, the 11th studio album by post-rock duo El Ten Eleven, is a bit of something old and something new. The most notable change to the group’s sound is the addition of piano and strings for the first time on any of their recordings, which make the album easily the most cinematic-sounding project they’ve ever released. The duo also decided to bring back the delay pedal which was central to their early sound.
Opener “Uncanny Valley Girl,” meant as a commentary about AI taking over the world, is El Ten Eleven at their best. It starts with an angular but funky bassline which ping-pongs through the speakers as the delay dices it up, and the pianos and strings refreshingly add textural depth. Then the rhythm comes together as…
Tag Archive: Joyful Noise
…includes a bonus disc of demos and two previously unreleased B-sides from the original sessions, “Comin’ To You” and “Harpsi Chords”.
The third solo album by K Ishibashi under his Kishi Bashi moniker, Sonderlust comes with a tweak to his sound, a footnote on the title, and some emotional baggage. The title is a play on the recently invented word sonder from the Web’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Essentially, it refers to the realization that any random stranger has a life experience as vivid as one’s own. As for the baggage, Ishibashi has admitted to suffering marital woes while working on the album, a fact that affected its tone and especially lyrics, which are often colored by uncertainty. It may also have altered his creative process, given…
Jessica Pratt sings in a voice as gentle as unspun wool, but her stories feel deeply rooted, like they were born from a collective subconscious to reveal fundamental truths about human longing. Asher White gets at similarly heady ideas: leaving your city to seek reinvention, wondering whether your fate is predetermined. But where Pratt works primarily in the folk tradition, White’s approach is decidedly contemporary, drawing from Palberta and 100 gecs’ internet-laden glitchiness. Her music has the jangling, intentionally constructed commotion of an artist who synthesizes new sounds to understand something essential about the world she lives in.
As timeless as Pratt’s songs have always been, she’s followed a clear evolution since…
What would an alien satellite tell us if it could overcome the gulf of time, space and language? “Thirteen thousand years orbit Earth get mistaken for trash,” suggests Wendy Eisenberg, their cool, clear voice transforming compressed lyrics into a post-human plea for connection. It’s a sharp opening to a fresh, ferocious third album from Editrix – an experimental trio founded in Massachusetts’ DIY scene – which explores forms of frustrated, imbalanced communication via a musical language all their own.
From rock’s foundations and various genres – blues, jazz, punk, prog, hardcore, indie, metal – Editrix carve a style that is articulate and crushingly exhilarating. With galloping interplay between Steve Cameron’s bass and Josh Daniel’s…