Posts by Sand Avidar-Walzer

The last time I saw Godspeed You! Black Emperor live, they were still called Godspeed You Black Emperor!.  It was 2002 and they were touring ahead of the still-unreleased Yanqui U.X.O.  Shortly after that they announced a “hiatus,” which ended up lasting nearly a decade.  13 years later, as they take the stage in Brooklyn’s […]

[rating=6.00] The mantle of “experimental pop” is a pretty heavy one for a band to carry in the year 2015. For one thing, the line between margin and mainstream has been collapsing for at least a decade now, and arguably since grunge broke in the early ‘90s and “alternative” became another word for “cash cow.”  […]

[rating=8.00] The first Twin Shadow album, Forget, released in 2010, was a beautiful surprise. Pulsating and dreamy, awash with synths and drum machines, it drew instant comparisons to ‘80s New Wave and New Romantic influences, to which it clearly owed a debt. Twin Shadow, aka George Lewis, Jr., was obviously well-versed in ‘80s synth-pop, but […]

[rating=7.00] Here’s the good news: Rebel Heart is better than anything Madonna has put out in a while – a long while. Critical opinion is fairly unified on the fact that it’s her best since 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor. And while it’s not as consistently good as the non-stop dancetravaganza of Confessions, it’s […]

The trajectory of Nika Danilova’s Zola Jesus live shows has directly paralleled the trajectory of her recorded output: in just five years, she’s gone from mostly solo performances of lo-fi, Gothy drones to carefully orchestrated productions in which dark tinges barely disguise slickly-produced pop leanings. This evolution was in full effect Sunday night in Manhattan’s […]

Versions sounds both familiar and new, both surprising and self-evident; the songs here aren’t rebuilt from scratch so much as refined, clarified, crystallized. Only time will tell whether Versions is the end of the first chapter of the Zola Jesus discography or the beginning of the second, but it’s a worthwhile and fascinating effort in either case.