Fireworks Fall
When I think of the greatest guitarists, I think of ventriloquists. Some players just make it sound like it's talking! I wish there were another way to put it. But anyone who's picked one up knows that's how it is. It's a tree of light in your fingers.
MJ Lenderman is one of the greatest guitarists. A supreme pleasure I get out of listening to his latest album is the sick guitar. He makes it talk, baby! I hear Dinosaur Jr. and Zappa’s best; I hear chapters in a book that switches narrators. I even hear brat summer turn to fireworks fall.
The opener to Mitski's latest album, “Bug Like an Angel,” starts as many songs do: with a single strum of an acoustic guitar. It’s not long before her voice becomes a choir, and the effect is that of intoxication, a blossom in the bloodstream, sinking at first and floating toward the end. Iggy Pop has described her as “probably the most advanced American songwriter that I know.”
Steve Albini—perhaps the greatest audio engineer of my lifetime, the first producer I knew by name—is dead at 61 this week. He produced thousands of records, dozens of masterpieces, and shaped the sound of the 90s through his work with Nirvana, PJ Harvey, and the Pixies.
A 2012 profile in the New Yorker put it best: “People seldom forget their first encounters with Nine Inch Nails.” I certainly didn’t—I was trying to find someone to cut my hair to look like Ewan McGregor’s. My stepmom took me to her friend’s house, a former hairdresser who looked a little like John Cameron Mitchell. In his kitchen, in fading light, he perfect a Kenobi-cut while The Downward Spiral played.
Philip Glass is one of those names—the name of perhaps the most famous living composer, of course—that you’ve either heard but never investigated or have read about so many times that your eyes are rolling already. His reputation lies halfway between never needing to be written about again and still needing everybody with a pen to do so.
The National put out their second album of 2023 last week, a companion to this spring’s First Two Pages of Frankenstein. The record is called Laugh Track, and right down to the guest stars, Swiftie production sound, and variant album cover, this feels like Frankenstein’s twin brother.
Over eight albums and almost twenty years, surprisingly little has changed about Beach House. They still write gothic, cavernous love songs that glint and gleam like the sea.
Whose is your favorite voice? It’s a question I was never asked, but I remember the day I knew my answer.
Waxahatchee writes poetry so precise it carves silhouettes out of thin air, and she sings through smoke that's more clove than Marlboro. It feels like sandpaper for the soul.
Fiona Apple only releases one album a decade, and she just delivered a new one last night. Fetch the Bolt Cutters completely derailed any plans I had for this issue.
MJ Lenderman is one of the greatest guitarists. A supreme pleasure I get out of listening to his latest album is the sick guitar. He makes it talk, baby! I hear Dinosaur Jr. and Zappa’s best; I hear chapters in a book that switches narrators.