Punk Soul Poet

Reposted from: pitchfork.com

San Francisco’s Desertshore ostensibly took their name from Nico‘s 1970 album, the one where she began writing her own songs and exerting more control over her sound and style. A decidedly more personal than commercial album– with a few songs in German and one sung by her son– Desertshore was not a hit, at…

Reposted from: pitchfork.com

James Holden’s Border Community is a label known for its between-genre dislocation, an imprint that takes dance-music influences, warms them over on the stove, and then buries them in fuzzy pink noise. Home to artists like Nathan Fake, Luke Abbott, and, of course Holden himself, it has a habit of drenching techno in longing nostalgia and…

Reposted from: rollingstone.com

If you’ve ever slowly blinked back to consciousness in a dentist’s chair, unable to distinguish dream from fact, you already know what King Krule sounds like. Archy Marshall, the 17-year-old who wrote and sing- mumbles this five-song EP, exaggerates his South East London accent and douses his voice in echo, so it’s slurred and evasive. Slow hip-hop beats…

Reposted from rollingstone.com

This best-of compilation cleaves Patti Smith‘s career into two halves: nine songs from her 1970s years as a firebrand-New-York-City-poet-turned-punk-rock-high-priestess, nine from her post-1988 comeback. A perfect primer for those who’ve discovered her through her recent National Book Award-winning memoir, it flows better than 2002′s double-disc anthology, Land. It also does…

Reposted from sputnikmusic.com

Past Life Martyred Saints is a curious beast. The debut record from Erika M. Anderson demands a visceral reaction, its gut-churning sonics prompting either revulsion, rapture, or a healthy dose of both. But it’s also an album that takes its sweet time to really get under your skin. There’s a palpable sense of displacement and uncertainty that…