Niklas Pivic

This is one of the best Swedish rap albums in the past decade.

'Watchers' is one of the best songs of 2024, full stop. What a transformational piece.

What an astounding album. Styles range from lo-fi noise à la Broadcast to metal-meets-Lana del Rey to experimental distant-sounding noise to lovely guitar-based scaled-down rock. This is truly inspirational and too short an album, even though it clocks in at nearly 90 minutes of length. Wow.

With songs like 'Sex Beat' and 'She's Like Heroin to Me', what could possibly go wrong? What derelict rock. The only band that could match The Cramps in my book, although they go together in very different ways.

My money says Nick Cave would have loved to have sounded like this when he was in The Birthday Party. My money also says Blixa Bargeld probably didn't give a fuck about this band and I could be dead wrong.

Also: this album cover=5/5.

It's hard to review this album. Gould worked and reworked Bach during most of his life. When he first hit the scene, he played Bach differently on recordings and live, differently than most other pianists, definitely with more verve than most others, due to his wondrous technical skills but also without any fucking care about being subservient to God, meaning Bach.

This is a collection that both serves as a plain painting of Gould's brilliance as a piano player but mainly in showing how differently he played materials that are largely considered to be above its players; when hearing Gould play, I think its evident he's on par with Bach. Sure, Gould interprets what another person gas composed, but damn… More

One of the best-ever Xmas songs. Everyone should hear it.

For me, it's hard to not see this album as an elevation for a survivor of sorts. Cave's two sons have died and I can't understand the depths of those sorrows; I've experienced visceral and all-consuming sorrow in different ways, but I feel—and I may very well be wrong about this—that Cave's spiritual sides have grown beyond that of the christian concept of God, into something that I identify as unitarian universalist.

The first half of the album uses Cave's voice as that of a gospel preacher, rhythmically and repetitively, throwing his audience into a trance. The addition of a gospel choir in a few places doesn't hurt.

I dig how the drums sound as though the mics… More

This may sound contrite, but I'll say it anyway: the unreleased Steve Albini version of this album, recorded in 1997, is excellent. A sheer power-pop masterpiece. Some of the songs just bleed fun and love for music. Every single bit is lovely.

On the "Rockline 2003" show, someone called in and asked the band for the history behind this disc, and Bun E. Carlos gave the explanation. The "In Color" album was produced by Tom Werman, but the band always felt that Werman screwed up the album. "He made it safe for radio, but the album sounds like it was done in a cardboard box." So, in 1997, they were in the studio hanging around with Steve Albini and had… More

I wrote this a couple of weeks after the album was released:

Alvvays' third album is their best yet.

In a couple of weeks, I've played this album over twenty times. Yeah. It's that good.

Alvvays don't shy away from their influences—The Smiths, shoegaze stuff, twee indie bands—but they bring great songs to the table, songs with odd chord changes, loads of melodies, no show–offy shit but rather a communal sense of wanting to do whatever makes the best song, and more melodies. I love the fact that they're using two different singers. And synths. Reliable drums. Great guitar sounds and riffs. This is some fun and great shit. I feel that Alvvays have feared nothing while… More