‘Sand + Bone’ Confronts What War Does to a Man
Sand + Bone doesn't take a position so much as it illustrates a problem.
Mike Schiller
Mike Schiller is a software engineer in Buffalo, NY. He has blogged and written music and video game reviews for PopMatters since 2004, and also spent a couple years editing the Multimedia section. He also spent five years writing regular game reviews for the Raleigh News & Observer, and has had freelance work published at The Escapist and Polygon.
Swans: The Great Annihilator / Michael Gira: Drainland
By pairing The Great Annihilator with Drainland, the emotional rawness of Gira and Jarboe's art comes through in full color.
Threefifty: Gently Among the Coals
It's rare to find a band so unbeholden to genre as Threefifty.
alt-J: Relaxer
The real gold on Relaxer happens when alt-J reins in the gimmickry a bit and starts writing folk songs.
Joni Void: Selfless
At heart, Selfless is an interesting exercise in intentional dissociation.
Oceans Are Zeroes: Oceans Are Zeroes
Oceans Are Zeroes will leave you emotionally exhausted and utterly satisfied.
Takashi Miyaki: The Dream
The Dream could loosely be described as a shoegaze dreampop album, though that doesn't even begin to touch the number of genres and styles that show up in one form or another.
From Garden to Higher Truth: The Legacy of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell
No matter what Chris Cornell did, there was always the sense that he was doing what he wanted.
Lord RAJA: Amadeus EP
If you're going to so publicly announce that your music is a reaction to something, that music should stand on its own as such a reaction.
Brother Ali: All the Beauty in This Whole Life
All the Beauty in This Whole Life is infused with the constant drive to push forward, to do better, to love harder.
Clark: Death Peak
Death Peak is an album-length argument for Clark's assertion that the human voice is "the most perfect synth".
‘Freddie Mercury’: The Stories, Fables, Parables, and Odysseys of the Man and the Band
Nearly anyone who picks up An Illustrated Life will have a predefined idea of Freddie Mercury; Blake's book is a marvelous document of how we came to accept that idea as truth.