Office Culture - A Life of Crime (2019)

Office Culture - A Life of Crime

Sophisti-pop by way of Brooklyn, New York ends up yielding many comparisons to the dense cityscapes of England's Joe Jackson and Prefab Sprout, but Office Culture owes more to its bureaucratic namesake than to any late-night parties. In reality, A Life of Crime is a drawn-out and beautiful trip through the first hour of a New Years' day spent alone at a low-lit bar outside Bed-Stuy.
~9.0

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Concert Review: Wilco at The Riviera Theatre, – 3/26/23

Wilco at The Riviera Theatre, – 3/26/23 Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood was once the center of the city’s booming entertainment district. Located at what had initially been the end of the L Train system, The Aragon Ballroom, Green Mill Jazz Club, and long-defunct Uptown Theatre quickly defined the corners of Broadway and Lawrence Avenue as the designated area for Chicagoans to congregate for the arts. As the area’s zeitgeist waivered though, the theatres grew into a weekend oasis of vibrancy amongst an otherwise casual and sleepy north-side neighborhood. Given Wilco’s consistent championing of Chicago’s local institutions, and another Uptown landmark Carol’s Pub in particular, The Rivera Theater seems like exactly the kind of venue for the band to host their latest three-night run and the start of their spring tour. Jeff Tweedy and company know the former movie palace well, playing there many times over the years and even using it as the base for a five-night series of performances b...

Buck Meek – Haunted Mountain (2023)

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Fever Ray - Radical Romantics (2023)

Fever Ray – Radical Romantics Karin Dreijer’s debut solo album Fever Ray came out only shortly after Silent Shout , an album that was almost immediately hailed as The Knife’s masterpiece. The inevitable comparisons seeped out, no one was completely ready to accept the more cavernous Fever Ray as any sort of a replacement for the lush maximalism of Dreijer and her brother’s The Knife. Regardless, Dreijer had proved how essential they were to that project and by 2014, the two had disbanded. Fever Ray’s next album Plunge continued Dreijer’s push towards empty space with an angrier and more overtly political edge and simultaneously built Fever Ray into a proper entity in its own right. Radical Romantics is a Fever Ray album in that its fixations swarm around Dreijer, all their proclivities, and all their vulnerabilities. It’s also the closest Fever Ray has ever sounded like The Knife, whether it be the soaring and anthemic “Shiver”, or the pronounced synths ripples on “New Utensi...

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