ZACH HILL - FACE TAT
EXPERIMENTAL/ROCK
SIMILAR ARTISTS: DEATH GRIPS, THE I.L.Y'S
This is a really weird album. Weirder than one might expect from the first two tracks, which are comparatively normal. It's an experimental, drum focused, poppy, rock-ish, crazy, mind boggling thrill ride with no real stopping point. All the drums on this album are live, surprisingly, showcasing the incredible talent of someone who is in my mind one of the best drummers alive right now, Zach Hill. Vocals, if they are even there, take a back seat to the instrumentation, which is at times borderline poppy (The Primitives Talk, Memo To The Man) and at times inscrutable and closer to a wall of pure sound (Sacto Smile). Sometimes he flies close to his background in math rock, like on House of Hits, while in others he tends heavily towards a stranger or more electronic style (Gross Sales). It's a variety show full of craziness, and an awesome and inspiring album. Very abrasive though, so go into it prepared to not like it until some point in the next few hours, days, or weeks where everything clicks and you start loving it.
FKA TWIGS - LP1
RNB/ELECTRONIC
SIMILAR ARTISTS: BJORK, SAMPHA
A quiet and ethereal album full of small strange details, with production headed by Arca, icon of dark experimentation. This is a pretty transcendentally styled album, with a lot of beautiful soaring synths or instrumentation and drum patterns that clatter and click to contrast and complement them. While Half-Light is the niceties and grand gestures of love, this album is the grittier and stranger feelings that come with, portrayed just as beautifully as the normal aspects. In fact, that's almost the perfect way to describe the album—grittily and darkly beautiful. Her love becomes an obsession, something that consumes and envelopes her over the course of the album—prompting an equal amount of introspection and external posturing to finally attain the crush she's been brewing in: removing obstacles in her way (Give Up), forcing him to break up with his current love (Two Weeks), or telling him how much she obsesses over him (Hours, Pendulum). This album is definitely the poster child of strangely beautiful.