Posts by Brice Ezell

Terrence Malick’s latest hits home release, but is it worth your time?

Ben Wheatley’s shoot-em-up is out now on Blu-ray.

[rating=9.00] Ten years ago, night fell over Kortadela. On his vividly colored, sample-heavy 2007 breakthrough LP, Swedish songwriter Jens Lekman juxtaposes vibrant pop with dryly funny quotidian narratives. Lekman is adept at making even the most mundane, fleeting moments seem significant. It helps that he’s a hilarious narrator to boot: on “The Opposite of Hallelujah,” […]

[rating=6.00] There’s an ongoing debate about the state of the Avett Brothers’ music that begins with 2009’s Rick Rubin-produced I and Love and You. The Avett Brothers, a North Carolina-based group led up by Scott and Seth Avett, made a name for themselves in the mid-2000s with their brand of earnest and high energy roots […]

[rating=8.00] Sunbather, the 2013 album by the then Bay Area (now Los Angeles) “metalgaze” outfit Deafheaven, was, and arguably still is, dangerously close to merchandising itself into self-parody. The record’s sleeve art (designed by Nick Steinhardt) is indeed a beautiful thing. Its unmistakable color scheme is meant to mimic the color of a person’s eyelids […]

[rating=8.00] Regardless of what one’s opinion of Between the Buried and Me’s 2012 concept LP The Parallax II: Future Sequence is, it’s hard to deny one thing: it’s certainly the band’s Most Album. Running 72 minutes long over 12 tracks, three of which run over the ten minute length, Future Sequence is a brain-twisting phantasmagoria […]

[rating=3.00] If nothing else, the California rock outfit the Mowgli’s will always have “San Francisco”. That tune, a jubilant ode to “being in love with love”, is no doubt guilty of pressing all the standard pop music buttons, but it does so exceedingly well, to the point that it’s no wonder that this seven-piece group […]

[rating=3.00] No Pier Pressure answers a lot of questions, many if not most of which the world probably didn’t need to ask in the first place. These include: “What if Carnival Cruise Lines hired Brian Wilson as their songwriter-in-residence?” “Should a Brian Wilson/Tiësto collaboration ever be a thing?” And, most tellingly, “What’s the worst corny […]

On their fourth LP, Punch Brothers continue to push themselves compositionally, balancing the cerebral and emotional aspects of their music.

[rating=7.00] Ten years have passed since the Toronto bass and drums duo Death from Above 1979 released its debut LP, the high-octane You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine. For a good while, it seemed that record would be the only full-length release the duo would put out, following an extended hiatus that began in 2006. […]

[rating=7.00] Over the course of No-Man’s six studio recordings, singer/songwriter Tim Bowness wrote some of the most poignant lyrics in the realm of modern music. With multi-instrumentalist and progressive rock legend Steven Wilson backing his minimalist, abstract words, Bowness spun tales of suburban dystopia (1996’s Wild Opera), lush romanticism (1994’s Flowermouth), and heartbreak (2003’s Together […]

[rating=6.00] On  Mutineers, David Gray’s first release in four years, the problem is not that he has left the building, but rather that he is lost down a better forgotten corridor. With 2005’s Life in Slow Motion, English singer/songwriter David Gray released the album that his fellow countrymen in Coldplay should have recorded following their […]

“Cusp of Eternity” probably won’t appeal to the band’s early fans, but it’s another step in their fascinating sonic journey.

What ‘A Dotted Line,’ Nickel Creek’s first studio LP in nine years, made clear in CD format is even truer live: This trio hasn’t lost a step.

unlike ‘’Round the Sun’’s nauseating cover art, this is a smooth ride through and through.

What makes this performance so stellar is that it never feels like imitation, even really good imitation.

The albums that make up this list reflect metal’s increasing ability to outgrow people’s conceptions of it, in the process making progress not just for itself, but all the other genres it’s come to challenge.

It’s tough to argue against his stature as the progressive rock icon.

Brice Ezell puts a spotlight on Elliott’s overlooked ‘Songs’ trilogy.

It’s immersive in exactly the way instrumental music should strive to be — it doesn’t insist upon its own epic qualities.