Weekly Album: Week of 06/18 - 06/24 - Phantom Island

This week I listened to Phantom Island by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. This is the most recent release by this prolific rock band. I'm just going to come out and say it, this album is yet another release in the band's recent history that is inoffensively fine. There is nothing particularly bad about the album, but none of it stands out very much. After the first two tracks, both being singles for the album, the rest of the album sounds extremely samey with a few breaks from the monotony here and there. There is a distinct lack of a lot of interesting melodies, and the orchestral elements are extremely underutilized. The production isn't the best, especially on the vocals. They sound so obscured in the mix sometimes. None of this is outwardly bad. It's just fine. It is more making me lament the further mediocrity of a band I love and was once the pinnacle of creativity in modern rock music. I was going to make this a "King Gizzard Post-Mortem" of sorts but I realized it would be so long and ranty that it would take away from my actual thoughts about the album, so I won't rant in this post but I do plan on making a rant post. This is an average album from a band that I know can do better, and has done so much better. 5/10

Weekly Album: Week of 06/11 - 06/17 - Thank You, Guitar

This week I listened to Thank You, Guitar by Cyrus Pireh. Before I start talking about the album itself, I want to mention my relationship with this album. Through Cyrus' YouTube channel, I (and the rest of his viewers) have had the privilege of seeing this album be developed before our very eyes. I've seen some of these songs start from just the tiniest of ideas, so to see them fully developed feels very satisfying to me. As for the music itself, it is fantastic. Cyrus creates what I consider to be music that takes full advantage of being written on and for the guitar. It is some of the most unique playing I've ever heard. They have odd rhythms and unique harmonies that I just don't really hear elsewhere in the world of guitar music. He has an impeccable sense of groove, showcased very well by the track "Amen Family" where he uses the "Amen Break" drum pattern as the foundation for the whole piece. I found myself tapping my foot the whole time listening to that one. There are also several songs that make use of delay effects, a standout one for me being "Free Palestine" (great song title as well). It has the swirly tape delay that just creates a beautiful cacophony of guitar. And what a beautiful sounding guitar it is too; it can be so distorted at times but can produce such beautiful and pristine clean sounds. Another unique track is "Sheep Graze" which sees Cyrus arranging the Bach piece "Sheep May Safely Graze". I've mentioned in my Switched-On Bach II review that "Sheep May Safely Graze" is my favorite Bach piece and I can say with zero uncertainty that Cyrus' arrangement which I heard on YouTube is the reason for that, so I hope that gets across how much I like "Sheep Graze". I was very heavily anticipating the release of this album, and I have to say I was not disappointed. 10/10 album

Stavi Gives Tribute to Brian Wilson

Today it was announced to the public that Brian Wilson had passed away. I cannot adequately put into words what I love about Brian Wilson's music, especially his work in the mid 60s on albums like Pet Sounds and the abandoned Smile album. That music has pushed my own creativity in ways only a handful of other artists have done for me. As a tribute I'm linking a few Beach Boys covers I've done in a chiptune style over the years. I haven't really talked about my own music on here before, and now isn't really the right time either, but I hope my attention to detail in these covers can convey how much I love and respect Brian Wilson and the beautiful music he created. To Brian.

Surf's Up: https://tinyurl.com/24jgusxe

That's Not Me: https://tinyurl.com/227r3olr

Caroline No: https://tinyurl.com/2xlofm7m

Weekly Album: Week of 06/04 - 06/10 - Look Now Look Again

This week I listened to "Look Now Look Again" by Rainer Maria. Rainer Maria has always been a band on my radar, coming from the same era of Emo that most of my favorite Emo bands come from, the 90s midwest scene. This is what I would call some proper Midwest Emo, before the genre became a mix of Emo flavored Pop Punk and less obtuse Math Rock. While there are some good bands in this more modern take on the genre, the real deal stuff from the 90s is what I love the most. It's still rooted in Punk and Post-Hardcore, but there is that twinge of sadness and melancholy in everything and a bit of a sparkle in the guitars that makes it sound Emo to me. The guitar work on this album is very pretty. It is comprised of arpeggios and interesting sounding chords that just sound so lush. The drums sound great; the snare drum having this wide open crack that was sort of the style at the time in Emo. I hear it in several other bands from the time and there is a reason because it just sounds so great. The vocals on this album are beautiful, from both the guitarist and bassist of the band. Their voices provide such great contrast against each other, certainly reminding me of Everyone Asked About You (though it is very possibly they were influenced by Rainer Maria in this case). This album does not miss a beat anywhere as all the songs are of a fantastic quality. Since there are only 9 songs with the album being 34 minutes it doesn't drag on too long but it doesn't overstay it's welcome either. This is a fantastic album and I'm excited to get more into the band. 9/10 album. 

Weekly Album: Week of 05/28 - 06/03 - Collective Works

Before I start this review I would just like to thank everyone for being patient with me. I will do the 7 reviews I missed before the end of the year!

This week I listened to Collective Works by the Boston Common. The Barbershop style has always been a passing interest of mine. It is such a unique style of music; four people singing together in complex harmonies. It also tickles my fascination of older and historically significant forms of media, as Barbershop has been around for a long time. I will not pretend to be an expert on the style, as my interest in it has always been from the perspective of a distant observer. My first real introduction was, like many in the modern day, through clips of the quartet the Newfangled Four about 7 or 8 years ago. Since then my interest for it has come and gone, but in recent months I've come back to it. It is always something that is there when I need it. As a part of this recent exploration I decided I would try to listen to some other quartets outside of the few that I tended to favor. Through this exploration I had heard a snippet of the refrain from the song "That Old Quartet of Mine". I thought the harmony was beautiful and the topic seemed interesting to me, wondering about your quartet from years prior. I went to the internet and the main result was a performance from the 1980 International Quartet Competition by a quartet known as the Boston Common, this performance being significant for them as it was this competition where they won 1st place, a performance that seems somewhat legendary from what I have gathered reading about them online (like I said, not an expert). I quickly fell in love with the performance, listening to it over and over; such beautiful harmonies that blend so well together. Since it was an older performance, it was also in a more older style of Barbershop that I've started to prefer during my recent fascination with the style. From here, I took it upon myself to listen to more of this quartet as I really felt that I would end up falling in love with more of their performances. This (finally) brings me to this week's album, Collective Works, being a collection of all of their studio material. Now, I try not to do compilation albums for these reviews as I believe in the sanctity of the album format, but I did not have much of a choice in the matter as the most easily available recordings of the Boston Common are either this or a 1982 live performance, which was a good choice, but I wanted the full experience. I would say that I enjoyed a good majority of the tracks in this compilation, but there is a very clear distinction in the songs that I enjoyed more than the others. The slower, more ballad-like songs were certainly the ones I preferred overall. This is very good for me if I only listened to what is considered Disc 1, as most of those songs fit into that category. But in Disc 2 there are significantly fewer of those songs, which was somewhat disappointing as I feel that is what the Boston Common sing best. There is a certain sense of forlorn in the way the Quartet sings, especially the lead, that fits the ballad-like songs very well, but then sounds somewhat out of place on the upbeat, stereotypical Barbershop sounding songs. Two that come to mind from the album would be "There'll Be No New Tunes on This Old Piano" and "Barbershop Strut". These songs in particular just sound so strange being sung by the Boston Common, they don't really sound very upbeat or happy singing them. Not that they are bad performances by any means, but certainly not as good as their ballads. 

It's also now a good time to mention something important about the history of this quartet. In 1982, their lead Rich Knapp was in a devastating motor accident that left him unable to properly tune his singing voice for a long time, so for a while they had another singer, Tom Spirito from the quartet the Four Rascals, fill in. The last 10 songs on this were songs with Tom Spirito singing lead, including the only version of "That Old Quartet of Mine". His voice is quite different from that of Rich Knapp's, much bassier than Knapp's. It certainly creates a unique blend between him and the rest of the quartet, but I much prefer Knapp's more reedy voice. The sudden change kind of brings a bit of a sour end to the album. I understand that this was likely just the chronological order of all of these recordings, but it feels a little wrong. I went through more than hour of listening to one singer, for it to suddenly switch. It is fine though, as the album ends on the song that started it all for me, "That Old Quartet of Mine". I was already familiar with this version of the song, and it is just as beautiful as all their other versions. That is a song that, despite the somewhat melancholic nature of its lyrics, still brings me joy to listen to. 

This was a good album, but I cannot see myself coming back and listening to it front to back like I have other albums that I have enjoyed as a part of this journey. The insane length paired with there being a lot of songs in a style I'm not particularly fond of from this quartet stop me from being able to listen to it more than the two times I did for this review. I will, however, be certainly coming to individual songs that I have enjoyed. I will never stop thinking about my own old quartet (while not a Barbershop quartet just a quartet of friends), nor will I stop thinking about this old quartet either. 7/10 album