Still Thinking

The following was written as a dual review with my friend Kelly Minnis, who merely liked the new Bully record. **************** I heard Bully for the first time while playing YouTube jukebox with Kelly Minnis in my living room. We were swapping the TV remote, slamming beers because I still did, and he says, “Ah, yes. You like female vocals.” Then he played the video for “Running” from Bully’s sophomore album Losing . The recommendation took. I owned Losing less than a week later. The thing I instantly liked about Losing was the nostalgia it contained. The album felt a time-capsule of 90s sensibilities. The production. The muted, twisted guitars and trigger-thumpy bass lines. Bognanno’s riot grrrl vocals. Even the video for “Running” (minus the cell-phones) looks like something that would make a young Noah Baumbach lose sleep. Losing feels like a love-letter to a bygone, younger era. It’s a solid record, one I turn to when it’s too hot for a flannel AND a cardigan but I still don’t w...

  Those who love metal music, especially extreme metal, understand something that those who do not simply never will, and that is how a music so immediately dark often reveals a light, even while explicitly challenging it. The idea is similar to horror cinema and literature: that which deals in mayhem often points most vividly to virtue. It’s the law of opposing forces. The dance of irony. The reward of the initiated. If the Devil can appear as an angel of light, perhaps the flip begs possibility for his adversary, as well. Crazier things have happened and will again. Ask the plagued Pharoah. Konvent is a four-piece hailing from Denmark. After a ridiculously successful demo released in 2017, which shot the band into immediate prominence on the festival circuit, Konvent released their first full-length album, Puritan Masochism, on January 24 via Napalm Records. An initial listen offers one blazingly solid assurance about these ladies: they’re not messing around. Puritan Masochism ...

The fact that Amalie Bruun released her new album Folkesange under her Myrkur moniker is significant. In a career spanning a mere fourteen years, Bruun has recorded under three names, each projecting a different timbre of her musical voice. As a debut self-titled solo act, Bruun recorded a handful of schizophrenic singer-songwriter “pop” albums that paid homage to an array of artists spanning ABBA, Kate Bush, Bjork, The Beatles, and maybe early career Beyonce(?). These songs were musically quaint and lyrically juvenile, but not necessarily in a good way. In 2013 and 2014, Bruun formed Ex Cops with a forgettable and chisel-chinned male hipster. The duo released two either pop-rock or rock-pop (actually, there is a difference) LPs -- albums as sugary and delightfully easy to sip as chilled Capri-Suns by a mid-summer swimming hole.  However, in 2014 Bruun also unleashed her greatest claim to clickbait fame when she was ousted as the one-woman black metal artist known only as Myrkur. ...