Album Reviews (Page 18)

Glass Animals – ZabaHarvest-out June 103 / 5Contributed by Bera Dunau (@BeraDunau) ZABA, the debut album from alternative rock band Glass Animals, is a relentlessly smooth piece of work. Indeed, it is the perfect accompaniment for a peaceful a.m. drive on a deserted freeway, where the only company can be found in the streetlights passing overhead. Unfortunately, this very smoothness is also the album’s greatest weakness, as it is so consistent in tone that the tracks have a tendency to blur together. This makes it a bit of a one-note effort, although the one thing that ZABA does, it does well. Glass Animals’ sound isRead More →

Meshell N’Degeocello – Comet, Come to MeNaive-out now2.5 / 5 There are a few things that give away to us how to score an album on this blog. Number one is ultimately compulsion – do we have to play an album again and again? Typhoon’s White Lighter suffered from this (and still does). Memory is the next thing, that is, do we keep playing the music in our head again and again (like Delta Spirit’s I Think I Found It)? And thirdly, if we’re familiar with the artist, where does it rate in their discography? To start from reverse, Me’shell NdegeOcello’s latest studio album, Comet,Read More →

Crash – Hardly CriminalCommunity Music – out May 62.5 / 5 Louisiana-native Christopher Richard belts one out – exactly one – on his debut full-length. The setlist is diverse, soul to folk to rock, but these songs lack that je ne sais quoi – actually, we can say what it is they lack: really provoking performances. Richard connects with his music, but can’t seem to get that music to connect with the listener. How can we tell? We’ve listened to the album a handful of times, and to us, there’s still only one song on it. The rest, one could say, is a blur. It’sRead More →