What have you been listening to this week?

I keep coming back to this NPR Tiny Desk Concert by the Swedish electro-pop band Little Dragon. https://youtu.be/Lti5hj6dyPc

I've also been listening to Sweet Trip's Velocity: Design: Comfort, which is a noisy, glitchy, wonderful mess of an album.

More of a curveball, but I've discovered Movietone and their 1999 album The Blossom Filled Streets - dreamy and nostalgic post-rock.

Darkthrone is releasing a new album later this week, so I have been listening to more or less their entire discography. It is the band I have listened to the most over the years, and while it was the early black metal stuff that got me hooked, I have really come to like their shift to new style of heavy punk inspired stuff from around The Cult Is Alive from 2006 and F.O.A.D.. I even like the mostly overlooked middle period with the albums Ravishing Grimness and Plaguewielder. Basically, I like everything they have made.

Some refound favorities are These Shores are Damned, Hedninger fra Helvete, Fucked up and ready to die, Valkyrie, Tundra Leech and Wake of the Awakened

Big elephant in the room of course, stayed up late to listen to Taylor Swift's "The Tortured Poets Department" and the 2AM release "The Anthology"!

So far I'm really enjoying the first half, "Fortnight" needs more Post Malone though. Florence + The Machine needs a bigger presence in "Florida!!!" as well! But "loml", "The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived", and "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" are my current favorites!

I was looking at the reviews for The Tortured Poets Department, which seem to be kind of muted especially compared to Swift’s previous albums. With Paste magazine giving a pretty scathing review.

While I like Swift overall, I wouldn’t say I’m a huge fan of hers. The first album I liked from her was 1989, and since then have only liked Lover and Midnights. Which I understand is kind of an exception considering how acclaimed folklore and evermore are.

I don’t like this album. I think a lot of the songs blend into each other, they’re all a little bland. Highlights for me are So Long, London and loml. But overall I wouldn’t consider it great. I never thought of Swift as a great lyricist or anything, especially when Lana exists, but it feels particularly weak here especially compared to Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS.

I found Tryglavs album The Ritual via YouTube and it’s just great melodic black metal. So great I went and bought a T-shirt. It’s one Croatian named Boris and that’s the band and it’s fantastic. The right mix of brutal distant screams and beautiful repeating melodies.

I don't listen to kpop as a general rule, but over the last ten days or so, I've been exploring music by Mamamoo, which is an outstanding group of women vocalists. Their music has influences from a dozen different styles, including latin, R&B, hip-hop, and jazz. Their live performances are as good, or even better than their official music videos. This one, Where are We Now?, is one of my favorite ballads from them.

They've also been shaking up conservative Korean attitudes, as they speak up for marginalized groups in society. Quite a change from most kpop music groups.

Wish I'd known of them earlier. They had a very successful tour in the US last year.

Latest Abigor album, a lot. As well as the latest one from The Vision Bleak and their disco.