INSIDE NOISE Week of 9/15
Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s most noteworthy popular releases. This will get updated throughout the week!
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We by Mitski
I’ll be honest, I was bracing myself for Mitski’s new record, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We. Bury Me at Makeout Creek and Puberty 2 are some of my all-time favorite indie albums, but given her underwhelming foray into indie disco-pop I wasn’t sure what to expect. This release certainly has a more minimal acoustic approach, with warm and moody americana supported by slow shuffling percussion and featuring those jazzy, purposeful chord progressions that consistently set apart Mitski’s songwriting from others in the genre. All of this is layered under her prominent and beautifully smooth voice as it wanders along endlessly downcast lyrics. In this way, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We is a refreshing step into pseudofolk with her signature brand of coffeeshop depression indie feeling more introspective and less strained, less performative than her recent projects. All this praise being the case, the record could certainly benefit from a little more fervor, occasionally falling into an energetic slump of “pleasant but vaguely uninteresting.” With a few familiar lyrical metaphors, the project also at times dons her signature brand of heavy handed, melodramatic poetry. Overall, I enjoyed the album more with each listen, finding myself warming up to these charming qualities just as I warmed up to the anxious melancholy of Makeout Creek. 8/10 - Carrie
End by Explosions in the Sky
When I say I like old Explosions in the Sky records, I'm talking about a fairly specific sound. Especially on How Strange, Innocence, the band explores the interplay between each of their instruments in absolutely fascinating ways, employing loop pedals to construct these larger-than-life compositions with competing lead lines that each outline some very crunchy yet surprisingly compatable chords. Basically, my main issue with their new record called End comes down to its extreme departure from that special earlier sound. Much of the record sounds fairly undifferentiated from the oversaturated film score industry, with the sprawling, experimental melodies replaced by very unimaginative riffs that one could find in the score to any direct to streaming mid-budget tv show. Two of the tracks, "Peace or Quiet" and "The Fight," save this record from getting an absolute beating in this review, since they do hearken back to that old style at least a bit, albeit in a watered-down fashion. 5/10. - Michael
Calling Corinne Bailey Rae an R&B artist really short-changes her a bit, since on her new record Black Rainbows she's also a traditional jazz vocalist, a pop punk singer, and the ringleader of some intense experimental compositions. The album flows coherently through these sounds, starting in a danicier fashion and eventually arriving at a point of more somber singing as Rae realizes she won't quite wrap up this spiritual journey as nicely as she might have hoped. The questions of identity and the permanence of our actions remain unanswered, but that doesn't make the album not worth while; rather, the journey helps us all process these ultimately unanswerable questions. Go ahead and give this one a try this week. 8/10. - Michael
