Review: "Beak & Claw" by s/s/s

Beak & Claw was released March 20,2012 by Anticon Records

Many of you may have been as shocked as I was when, a little over two weeks ago, the blogosphere lit up with news that Sufjan Stevens, the master composer who has brought us opuses like the timeless Illinois and and neoclassical symphony The BQE, was working on a hip-hop record. Beak & Claw is a four song EP which sees Stevens collaborating with Chicago's avant-garde rapper Serengeti and Denver's Son Lux, whose production style defies classification but lies somewhere between trip hop and ambient electronica. The first single "Museum Day", which was available to stream when the EP was announced, was exactly as out-there as one would expect. The song opens with Sufjan crooning some kind of bizarre, autotuned new age poetry ("Make it right, make it right, energy") and slows to a sparse drumbeat layered with spacey synthesizers and Serengeti drops some stream-of-consciousness rhymes before the song builds back up to its hooky chorus, the psychedelic insanity of which would make Wayne Coyne jealous.

Album Review: "Be the Void" by Dr. Dog

Be The Void was released on February 7, 2012 by Anti- Records

With so many new releases so far in early 2012, it would be understandably difficult for any one of them to stand out from the pack. Thankfully, bands exist that have never really cared about "the pack" and continued to charge bravely on doing what they do best. We have one such band in the resilient Philly-based freak-folk outfit known as Dr. Dog. Be the Void is their 6th studio effort and the second released by indie giant Anti- Records, who helped push their last release Shame, Shame to widespread recognition. Thought they're not really a household name (yet), Dr. Dog's burgeoning popularity seems to grow stronger by the second, and it's not at all undeserved.

Leonard Cohen's Forthcoming Release, "Old Ideas"

Leonard Cohen's "Old Ideas" will be
released January 31st, 2012 on Columbia Records.

After seven years of studio silence, the master songwriter Leonard Cohen will return with a new batch of songs at the end of the month. My excitement hangs in the air like a veil (the type you'd have to draw aside to see the serpent eat its tail), as Leonard Cohen holds an eternal place in my personal pantheon of critically important musicians. To build buzz for the release (because "Leonard Cohen is releasing a new album," is, for some reason, not enough for people), there have been three tracks from the forthcoming album released. The first to hit the net was "Show Me The Place," a vocal/piano number with a slow string build and Cohen's trademark lyrical depth and raspy vocals.  That was followed by "Darkness," whose swirling organ perfectly counterpoints the depth and darkness of Cohen's sound, and, most recently, a thinly-veiled battle with mortality, streaming from the New Yorker's culture desk, "Going Home." Click the link at left to listen to "Going Home," the other songs and the complete track list are after the jump.