Archive for the Jagjaguwar Category
Angel Olsen “All Mirrors” (Jagjaguwar)
The descent into darkness is a trope we find time again across history, literature and film. But there’s also an abyss above. There’s a winding white staircase that goes ever upward into the great unknown — each step, each turn, requiring a greater boldness and confidence than the one before. […]
Bon Iver “i,i” (Jagjaguwar)
i,i is Bon Iver’s most expansive, joyful and generous album to date. If For Emma, Forever Ago was the crisp, heart-strung isolation of a northern Winter; Bon Iver the rise and whirr of burgeoning Spring; and 22, A Million, a blistering, “crazy energy” Summer record, i,i completes the cycle: a […]
Black Mountain “Destroyer” (Jagjaguwar)
Black Mountain’s Stephen McBean turned 16 after Woodstock but before Varg started burning down Norwegian churches. And yet, until just two short years ago, McBean had lived his entire adolescence and adult life without a proper driver’s license, that first and most coveted ticket to personal independence. Black Mountain’s new […]
Foxygen “Seeing Other People” (Jagjaguwar)
Seeing Other People is curiously positioned as Foxygen’s most recent last-ever album. With every album the band dies; with every album the band is reborn. But unlike the last-ever Foxygen albums before it, this one seems to have a self-effacing bittersweetness to it that signifies some sort of passing; some […]
Jamila Woods “Legacy! Legacy!” (Jagjaguwar)
Jamila Woods has a voice and lyrical sensibility that transcends generations, and so it makes sense to have this lush and layered album that bounces seamlessly from one sonic aesthetic to another. This was the case on 2016’s HEAVN, which found Woods hopeful and exploratory, looking along the edges resilience […]
Sharon Van Etten “Remind Me Tomorrow” (Jagjaguwar)
Sharon Van Etten’s Remind Me Tomorrow comes four years after Are We There, and reckons with the life that gets lived when you put off the small and inevitable maintenance in favor of something more present. Throughout Remind Me Tomorrow, Sharon Van Etten veers towards the driving, dark glimmer moods […]
Unknown Mortal Orchestra “IC-01 Hanoi” (Jagjaguwar)
While recording Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s latest release, Sex and Food, Ruban Nielson, his longtime collaborator Jacob Portrait and his brother Kody Nielson, found themselves in the Vietnamese city of Hanoi playing and recording with local musicians at Phu Sa Studios. The studio, normally used for traditional Vietnamese music, found the […]
Lonnie Holley “Mith” (Jagjaguwar)
The expansive American experience Lonnie Holley quilts together across his astounding new album, MITH, is both multitudinous and finely detailed. Holley’s self-taught piano improvisations and stream-of-consciousness lyrical approach have only gained purpose and power since he introduced the musical side of his art in 2012 with Just Before Music, followed […]
Big Red Machine “Big Red Machine” (Jagjaguwar)
In 2008, Aaron Dessner sent Justin Vernon an instrumental sketch of a song called “Big Red Machine” for Dark Was The Night. This was before they had met in person. Justin wrote a song to it, interpreting the Big Red Machine title as a heart. 10 years of friendship later, […]
Julie Doiron “Desormais / Heart and Crime” (Jagjaguwar)
Julie Doiron’s stunning album Désormais, originally released via Jagjaguwar in 2001, marked a departure from the Canadian artist’s grunge pop releases in the 1990s. Like its title might suggest, the intimate record is sung almost entirely in French. Across Désormais ten tracks, Doiron builds a disarming and warm atmosphere – […]
Unknown Mortal Orchestra “Sex & Food” (Jagjaguwar)
Sex & Food is the most eclectic and expansive Unknown Mortal Orchestra release yet, from the light-footed R&B of “Hunnybee” to the stomping flange of “Major League Chemicals.” “If You’re Going to Break Yourself” and “Not in Love We’re Just High” chronicle the effects of drugs and addiction on personal […]
S Carey “Hundred Acres” (Jagjaguwar)
At its heart, Hundred Acres – the third full-length album from Wisconsin singer / songwriter S Carey – finds him grounded comfortably in his skin, but still with one foot in the stream. More direct than ever, there is a wellspring of confidence in this new batch of songs that […]
Foxygen “Hang” (Jagjaguwar)
Hang is Foxygen’s third album for Jagjaguwar, and their first proper studio record, recorded in Los Angeles, CA at Electro Vox Studios. Hang features Steven Drozd of the Flaming Lips, as well as Brian and Michael D’Addario of the Lemon Twigs as players on the album. Hang also features a […]
Bon Iver “22 A Million” (Jagjaguwar)
22 stands for Justin Vernon. The number’s recurrence in his life has become a meaningful pattern through encounter and recognition. A mile marker, a jersey number, a bill total. The reflection of ‘2’ is his identity bound up in duality: the relationship he has with himself and the relationship he […]
Preoccupations “Preoccupations” (Jagjaguwar)
Borne of an incomparable year, few records in 2016 come with as much baggage as Preoccupations’ self-titled. The newly renamed group’s past still chasing them like a carrier bag stuck to a shoe, they’ve stuck to a relatively stoic path, instead pouring every ounce of their anxiety, confusion and depression […]
Angel Olsen “My Woman” (Jagjaguwar)
Anyone reckless enough to have typecast Angel Olsen according to 2013’s Burn Your Fire For No Witness is in for a rethink with her third album, My Woman. The crunchier, blown-out production of the former is gone, but that fire is burning wilder. Her disarming, timeless voice is even more […]
Dinosaur Jr. “Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not” (Jagjaguwar)
Let’s face facts — in 2016 it is remarkable that there’s a new Dinosuar Jr album to go ape over. After all, the original line-up of the band (J Mascis, Lou Barlow & Murph) only recorded three full albums during their initial run in the 1980s. Everyone was gob-smacked when […]
The Cave Singers “Banshee” (Jagjaguwar)
The Cave Singers no longer sound like buskers picked up off the streets of Seattle, but they haven’t totally abandoned the stomp-and-clap rhythms that defined their 2007 debut, Invitation Songs, and carried all the way through 2011’s No Witch. The group seemed poised to shed their shaggy campfire aesthetic entirely […]
Black Mountain “IV” ( Jagjaguwar)
“We were toying with the idea of calling the album Our Strongest Material To Date” laughs Jeremy Schmidt. The Vancouver outfit’s keyboardist can afford to joke about what they describe as “the dog-eared ace of spades of all rock band platitudes.” It was during a solo show under his Sinoia […]
Sharon Van Etten “I Don’t Want To Let You Down” (Jagjaguwar)
Sharon Van Etten has never needed much room to make a grand statement. Consider that, with four albums diligently released during the last six years, she’s become one of music’s most astute new cartographers of the heart, able to capture emotional trials and triumphs with incisive lines and a voice […]
Black Mountain “s/t (10th Anniversary edition)” (Jagjaguwar)
It’s only a cliché because it’s true, but the greatest records are timeless. Black Mountain’s self-titled debut album is just such a record, its roots leading twisting paths back into the past, while always sounding like ‘now’, like a future still to come. The work of a small collective of […]