Artist: Dirty Projectors
Album: Swing Lo Magellan
One of the most basic music-theory concepts — I don’t know the fancy ones — is the “interval”: the gap between one note and the next. A “first” is the same note repeated. A “third” is two letters apart in terms of the note name: for example, a C followed by an E. The third might be a “major third” C to E, “minor third” C to E-flat, “augmented third” […]
Artist: Jonny Polonsky
Album: Intergalactic Messenger of Divine Light and Love
Can you imagine a halfway point between the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream? If so, you have a good musical imagination: well done! Also, you may have imagined something close to Jonny Polonsky’s Intergalactic Messenger of Divine Light and Love. I mean the guitar tones (weighted a bit towards the Pumpkins’ thick-textured grandiosity, especially the fierce solos), the song structures (leaning nearer the […]
Artist: Jukebox the Ghost
Album: Safe Travels
Jukebox the Ghost are a power-pop band. By this I mean they’re energetic; they sing about normal pop topics (loneliness, awkward crushes, relationships); their male singer sounds young and basically ordinary but carries tunes well; they play guitar and bass and keyboards and drums; they use clean production; and they rise and fall based on the strength of their melodies. They’re “pop” in the sense that this was an excellent […]