Nima Tayebian, an Italian painter who has become known for dark themes, revealed a superb series named Psychokinesis back in May of this year. The word itself Psychokinesis, meaning the supposed ability to move an object by mental effort alone, reflects slightly in this series. More like other series by Tayebian, this series reflects on the unknown nearly shapeless-like figures that give the audience a fright and trepidation. The dark backgrounds with moving-like textures blend in with the core subjects, making one feel a little claustrophobic and uncomfortable. It is also, the emotionless faces of these subjects that truly bring out the theme of a mystery.
You can find more work by Nima Tayebian here.
Post Malone isn’t just part of pop music’s depressive phase – he practically dominates it. But neither fame nor billions of streams have changed the melancholic mood of his songs – “Me and Kurt feel the same, too much pleasure is pain,” he proclaims on ‘Goodbyes’. He’s not the first rapper to reference the late Nirvana frontman, but his genuine appreciation for alternative rock leads to the kind of genre-bending versatility that sets him apart from his trap rap contemporaries. Impressively, everyone from Halsey to Kanye West to Father John Misty offer their contributions to this album. There’s the lead single, ‘Circles’, a catchy and pleasant indie tune produced by Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, or ‘Take What You Want’, a genuinely heavy metal-inspired cut (which is no surprise considering Post is an ex heavy metal guitarist), complete with guitar shreds and an Ozzy Osbourne feature (Travis Scott, of all people, is also on the track). As far as poppier tracks go, there are some decent highlights here, including the infectious ‘Sunflower’ feat. Swae Lee from the Spider-Verse soundtrack. Unfortunately, there’s also quite a bit of filler and a lack of coherence to the album – but the fact that it has at least one track to cater to every Spotify playlist is perhaps a more pertinent achievement in our age.
Considering the many strengths of Iggy Pop’s previous album, the critically acclaimed Post Pop Depression, Free is somewhat of a disappointment. Post Pop Depression utilized the dark, brooding production from Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age to the punk icon’s benefit, leading to a coherent and refreshingly modern-sounding record. Free, by contrast, is an intentionally looser, all-over-the-place experiment that ends up feeling more indulgent than profound. Teaming up with avant-garde guitarist Noveller, aka Sarah Lipstate, and jazz trumpeter Leron Thomas, the album features some interesting ideas that don’t quite mesh together – on the second half, the record veers off into a series of ambient, free jazz compositions where Pop’s impassioned spoken word has more of a distracting than an enhancing effect. “Just because I like big tits, doesn’t mean I like big dicks,” he hollers on ‘Dirty Sanchez’, forcing you to raise an eyebrow after having tuned out for a while. There are some tight post-punk cuts on the first half, though, including the single ‘Sonali’ and ‘James Bond’, which incorporate classic Iggy Pop elements with contemporary, more experimental production. It’s an at least intriguing record for Pop, a so-so left turn he’s more than earned at this point in his career.
Lost Girls was meant as a spiritual sequel to Joel Schumacher’s classic 1987 teen-goth film The Lost Boys; but somewhere along the way, what started as a soundtrack for a possible sequel Natasha Khan of Bat for Lashes was writing a script for became an album dedicated to the singer-songwriter’s love for the eighties. It’s an inherently nostalgic album all the way to the production, but it’s not the kind of nostalgia that rubs you the wrong way; it feels more like a personal journey through the culture that shaped Khan during her youth, particularly sci-fi and fantasy films, rather than superficial retromania. What gives it life, though, is less its own narrative, loosely centred around a character named Nikki Pink and a group of biker women in LA, than the cultural world it vividly recreates with its heavily cinematic synths, whether in the form of power pop ballads like opener ‘Kids in the Dark’, instrumental interludes (‘Vampires’), or dark disco bangers like ‘So Good’ and ‘Feel for You’. Lost Girls may lack the emotional immediacy and frequent inventiveness of Bat for Lashes’ previous outings, but it’s no less engaging.
With her fourth studio album with the project Frankie Cosmos, singer-songwriter Greta Kline proves herself once again as one of indie pop’s most reliably consistent auteurs – a term we don’t usually associate with indie artists. Close it Quietly is filled with 21 tracks that sit somewhere between the 1 and 2-minute mark, a familiar formula for Kline that still works by encapsulating a series of sharp, witty observations and intimate confessions of someone in their mid-twenties. “I remember feeling like aliens/ We were cottonballs dipped in sand/ Isn’t it weird how we have grown so far apart?” she laments on ‘Actin’ Weird’, while on ‘Last Season’s Textures’ she comments on the state of things from a distinctly introverted lens: “How’d the world get so devastating?/ I’m just fucking glad for my bubble/ Despite how often it is penetrated by evil.” Following 2018’s Vessel, Close it Quietly further presents Frankie Cosmos as more of a collaborative effort than just a solo project, and it becomes evident on the more dynamic nature of the instrumentals, especially on tracks like ‘Even Though I Knew’ and ‘I’m It’. There’s also quite a bit of self-referentiality on the album as Frankie Cosmos build their own little universe (pun intended), like on ‘Windows’: “I still like looking out of windows/ I know how to forgive those.” While the album opens with the proclamation that “the world is crumbling and I don’t have much to say”, the stream-of-consciousness lyrics that ensue are more than a delight to delve into.
R: Although we were both on our freshman year at university, the process was actually pretty smooth and relaxed. As someone who is a drummer first and foremost, learning guitar was quite a challenge as I was nowhere near proficient enough to play it on every song…but I still did. Also the software was incredibly restrictive, though I quite like that restrictiveness, as it challenges you to be more creative instead of relying on super fancy production tricks. Again, I was sort of viewing the production side as “if they couldn’t achieve this effect in the 60s, then I can’t do it now”.
Post Malone, Hollywood’s Bleeding: The latest release from superstar Post Malone is a 17-track follow-up to his 2018 album, Beerbongs & Bentleys. It features the already-released single, ‘Circles’, while the tracklisting reveals a track featuring Ozzy Osbourne and Travis Scott, as well as other contributions from the likes of Halsey, Future, SZA, Young Thug, Swae Lee, and more. Post Malone’s star-studded third album also features hits ‘Wow’ and ‘Sunflower’, the latter of which was featured on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Iggy Pop, Free: This is the eighteenth studio album from American punk icon Iggy Pop following his critically acclaimed 2016 album Post Pop Depression. “This is an album in which other artists speak for me, but I lend my voice,” Iggy says. “By the end of the tours following Post Pop Depression, I felt sure that I had rid myself of the problem of chronic insecurity that had dogged my life and career for too long. But I also felt drained. And I felt like I wanted to put on shades, turn my back, and walk away. I wanted to be free.” As a result, the album is more “uniquely somber and contemplative” than his previous releases.
Bat for Lashes, Lost Girls: Singer-songwriter Natasha Kahn, aka Bat for Lashes, returns with her fifth studio album titled Lost Girls, her first since 2016’s The Bride. The album was teased on social media, with one video featuring a number for a hotline that, when dialed, asked callers to leave a message about a lost girl called Nikki. Kahn has drawn inspiration from 80s culture for the record, citing influences such as Bananarama, Cyndi Lauper, The Blue Nile and film composer John Williams.
Frankie Cosmos, Close it Quietly: Indie folk group Frankie Cosmos have released their fourth studio effort, Close it Quietly, out now via Sub Pop. Co-produced by Gabe Wax, a press statement describes the album, which follows last year’s Vessel, as “a continual reframing of the known, taking the band’s trademark micro-universe and upending it, spilling outwards into a swirl of referentiality that’s a marked departure from earlier releases, imagining and reimagining motifs and sounds throughout the album.”
If Lana Del Rey’s work has often felt like the definition of style over substance, then Norman Fucking Rockwell! is the album that changes it all. The pop singer-songwriter’s sixth full-length release is a record full of emotional substance – not only her best material yet, but also her bravest and most mature. Del Rey lays her soul bare on every single track here, and it feels painfully honest at times: “If you hold me without hurting me/ You’ll be the first who ever did,” she sings on ‘Cinnamon Girl’, as if whispering close to your ear, while a similar sentiment comes through on ‘Happiness is a butterfly’: “If he’s a serial killer, then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl who’s already hurt?” Producer Jack Antonoff, who has produced for the likes of Lorde, Taylor Swift, and St. Vincent in the past few years, doesn’t alter Del Rey’s sound all that much; but his subtle contributions provide the groundwork for her elegantly quiet voice to shine rather than drown in reverb as it often does, while adding instrumental embellishments here and there. It’s also Del Rey’s most musically coherent album, and at 67 minutes, rather than feeling overlong – another pop album full of filler designed for Spotify playlists – nearly every song (with the possible exception of ‘The Next Best American Record’, the weakest cut here), is impressively heart-wrenching and well-written. But Del Rey saves the best for last, a raw piano ballad with her voice front and center titled ‘hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but I have it’, where she likens herself to Sylvia Plath, takes a stab at her critics (“They write that I’m happy, they know that I’m not”, she sings, a reference to the discourse surrounding her previous album Lust for Life), pours her heart out, and holds on to a tiny glimmer of hope – just enough to rise from the ashes, like Lady Lazarus herself.
To match the massive hype surrounding their first new album in 13 years, Tool understandably had to make Fear Inoculum their most ambitious effort yet. Every Tool album so far has been more than an hour long, but this one clocks in at nearly 90 minutes, with most tracks being 10-minute-plus progressive metal epics. And yet, it’s somehow sadly their most disappointing album as well; although almost every song here would sound impressive on its own, in the context of the record, the band’s approach starts to grow stale, as they rehash a lot of the same ideas over and over to the point where the album becomes monotonous, frequently repetitive, and at worst, exhausting. There are certainly stand-out, solid moments here, like the track ‘Invincible’, where Maynard James Keenan express the band’s concern with staying relevant in the contemporary music scene through familiar war metaphors (“Warrior struggling to remain consequential”), or ‘7empest’, which remains hypnotically engaging throughout its 15-minute runtime. But, utilizing similar structures and themes, other tracks just aren’t exciting enough to justify their length, while the interludes don’t offer much either. Tool’s comeback feels a little bit like the latest Quentin Tarantino movie: technically masterful, characteristically aggressive (though the violence – or heaviness – is curiously watered down), featuring some undeniably virtuoso performances (drummer Danny Carey shines the most on the album) and a morbid sense of humour, but ultimately overlong and occasionally vapid.
Legendary Chicago rapper Common comes through with a breezy, soulful, and mostly laid-back album to accompany his recently released memoir. There’s nothing really extraordinary here, but it’s not trying to be – unlike his previous full-length release, 2016’s upbeat and politically charged Black America Again, Let Love is an easy-going, occasionally inspirational affair (despite what lead single ‘Hercules’ would have you think), with reliably competent rapping from an experienced artist who comfortably acknowledges and incorporates the new generation of hip-hop into his sound (he references the likes of Cardi B while featuring artists like Daniel Caesar and BJ the Chicago Kid alongside older souls like Swizz Beatz and Jill Scott). You can probably guess the main theme of the album from its title – or the title of nearly every song here, which includes the world ‘love’ – be it love for hip-hop masquerading as romantic love (‘HER Love’), or a generic love for God on ‘God is Love’. But the most heartwarming moment is ‘Show Me that You Love’, where Common sings about his relationship with his daughter with admirable honesty, admitting his mistakes and trying to view things from her perspective in the chorus: “Show me that you’re there/ Show me that you care/ I’ve been looking for you/ But you don’t wanna share,” Jill Scott sings on the chorus. This is dad rap at its finest. Unfortunately, much of the album is ultimately forgettable, but it’s a pleasant, sometimes moving listen while it’s on.
If Ezra Furman’s previous album, Transangelic Exodus, was an angry but meticulously crafted and ambitious concept album, Twelve Nudes channels that same kind of societal fury, this time in a raw and manically brief fashion. A ‘spiritually queer punk’ record, as Furman aptly described it, the indie songwriter’s eighth full-length release is filled with exhilarating, frantic garage rock tunes with the distortion cranked up and Furman’s unbridled, howling vocals as impassioned as ever. It’s a short but fun ride, with infectiously catchy songs like the opening single ‘Calm Down aka I Should Not Alone’ or the fast-paced ‘My Teeth Hurt’, but there’s a lot of personal pain behind these deceptively simple tunes. “Remember I tried to ask what it means to be a man? They threw me in the back of a truck and they tied my hands,” Furman laments on ‘Transition from Nowhere to Nowhere’, while on ‘Trauma’ he maturely proclaims, “Years roll on and they still have not dealt with our trauma”. It’s not as if there aren’t any playful songs here, though; the tongue-in-cheek ‘I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend’, by far the most musically accessible song on the record, is also the most lyrically subversive, making the impact of Furman’s gender-defying lines all the more potent: “All my friends are writing their resumes/ My responsible friends are applying for jobs/ But me, I was considering ditching Ezra, and going by Esme”. At the end of the day, despite all the pain and frustration, Furman suggests with the title of the closing track, ‘What Can You Do But Rock n’ Roll?’.