“…listeners expecting the singer to return to that brand of quirky synth-pop, or anything else else she previously explored, are in for a shock with the 25-year-old’s latest release, Generasian, a powerful, subversive reintroduction — and perhaps her truest introduction yet, to Kim.

Now doing her own thing as an independent artist, Lim Kim (Kim Ye-rim)’s new music is empowering as it is impactful, and it’s her explicit response to being placed in what she describes as a figurative box that she felt trapped in during the early days of her career.

[…] the impactful, genre-hopping Generasian in October. A declaration of her return (and a shift towards English-language music), it was a dramatic move, and one that was an expression of her identity as a Korean woman dealing with her place in the world at large. “I need to change up this game/ Don’t identify self in the male gaze/ I’m raising my voice to be heard/ Building my world,” she proclaims on “Sal-Ki.” “Decolonize from weakness/ Overpower their system,” she later says.

[…]
“Minjokyo,” which incorporates the Korean word usually used for ”nation” or ”people.” She’s inspired by Korean shamanism, which has traditionally incorporated singing and dancing into rituals, and sees herself as a modern day priestess of sorts. “I felt like Korean people have this energy with entertainment,” she says. “So I started thinking about making music about those spirits and rituals, and that was the basis of ‘Minjokyo.’ The reason it’s split into two tracks is that when you do that ritual you kind of enter that ritual and you start to sing and dance to go to the next phase, the new world, I guess.”

More @ Billboard

Unique vocals, I dig. “…disparate musical impulses crammed together in breathlessly intense, often dizzyingly off-the-wall songs that somehow cohere and lodge in the brain like pop earworms. Eleven of those make up the quartet’s 2019 album Crux, simultaneously the year’s most exhilarating and heart-wrenching heavy-rock album. In a time when metal is hopelessly subdivided, Moon Tooth cherry-pick from the genre’s entire spectrum, variously evoking Van Halen flash, Converge catharsis, Deftones soul, Mastodon intricacy, and Meshuggah heft. There’s something in each track on the album to piss off every purist — or delight any headbanger who’s grown weary of picking sides.”
More at Rolling Stone

Woah this is good

“Born and raised in 1990 in the village of Leninskiy near the small city of Pavlodar in the north-east of Kazakhstan, Scriptonite (real name Adil Zhalelov) positions his work as ‘Kazakh rap’…”

More in this profile

“Icy, unadorned space is broken up with grim organ bits on “Take Notice,” which appeared on Dilla’s Ruff Draft, originally a German-only vinyl EP in 2003 before Stones Throw issued it in its current extended version. The satisfying mixed bag on Ruff Draft was originally developed for a windows-down-low, ride-around-in-the-summer car stereo cassette tape experience. It’s almost all Dilla — “Take Notice” is the only Ruff Draft entry that features a guest emcee.”

Link

I love old school deathmetal Opeth, but this album feels like what they’ve been aiming for all along.

This whole album is great.

This aesthetic…

Amazing performance, esp. the piano solo that starts around 4:20

The second half with the violin and Ihsahn’s scream-fest is pretty epic.

<3

Profile in The Guardian

Original song…

Guitar god. Basically an ad but I dig the range of tones they demo in this.

Yvette Young | Covet

Cool image manipulation

I don’t even know. Mostly for the gritty aesthetic. Apparently it’s a streetwear brand or something from St. Petersburg.

<3

Wiki

Mike Patton / Faith No More vibes.

“On appropriately titled follow-up Outlier Twelve Foot Ninja distance themselves from the pack again, melding elements of prog, djent, funk, Latin, jazz, salsa, reggae, acoustic, bossa nova and alt-rock into a varied yet cohesive metal assault.

Armed with more musical ideas than most bands have in a lifetime and a level of technical proficiency to realise them, Twelve Foot Ninja waste no time asserting themselves on Outlier, with opener One Hand Killing providing a chaotic blend of heavy genres that serves as a microcosm of Outlier as a whole. As djent riffs lock in with funk filled grooves and jazzy piano passages, Kin Etik’S soulful vocals serve as the glue that holds it all together, delivering an emphatic high.”

Review

“That We Can Play was recorded with a single stereo Pro Tools track and “outboard, secondhand vintage synths and sequencers”.[2] Ford explained the process of making each song in an interview with XLR8R: “It’s almost like we just sit down with gear and are like, ‘Whoa, this sounds sweet,’ and then we’ll make a beat, and be like, ‘What if we do this?’ and something comes out and we move from there. Where it gets really complex—and you can’t be a slacker—is you have to inventorize all these tiny sounds and constantly be trying to fit all of these moving parts together and see what sticks—and it’s a lot of repetitive, careful-listening kind of work.”

The writing, recording and mixing of That We Can Play is rooted in 1980s power pop. On a technical level, according to Steve Shaw of Fact magazine, Games’s instrumentation includes everything expected in 1980’s music and is executed correctly: bass lines, strings, keytar and arpeggiators. Instead of merely reproducing the sound from that era, the band pushes the music into unfamiliar territory. According to Pitchfork Media’s Joe Colly, the EP has a nostalgic sound – due, in part, to the analog synths (“not just vintage but almost aged” instrumentation) and their “glitchy electro jams.””

Wiki | Ford & Lopatin Soundcloud