by Shannon Smith
There is a useful distinction between a band having a lot going on and a band knowing how to make a few things work together. Westside Cowboy spends much of It Goes On demonstrating the latter. Guitar figures repeat, chord progressions remain accessible, and individual instrumental parts rarely call attention to their difficulty. The music expands and contracts with the source of that movement becoming apparent: Westside Cowboy treats the ensemble itself as an arranging instrument.
That quality emerges through “Kick Stones.” A guitar pedal tone establishes the opening foundation before the rest [...]
by Shannon Smith
Pop reinventions often announce themselves with obvious gestures: a new image, a different genre, or a public break from the past. On Detour, Kim Petras chooses a quieter kind of reinvention. Her first independently released album certainly embraces rougher electronic textures, bloghouse nostalgia, and hyperpop experimentation, but the more revealing shift lies in how the songs are built. Detour generates momentum through evolving production layers. Rhythm, texture, and vocal treatment become the engines that carry the music forward.
That approach gives the album a distinct musical identity. The [...]
by Shannon Smith
Broken View finds Sam Barber building songs slowly and pushing them outward. Every arrangement on Broken View begins with something grounded that expands. Starting with acoustic sounds and close vocal phrasing before drums, layered guitars, steel, or fiddle broaden the emotional field around it. The record’s power does not come from oversized hooks or polished melodic repetition. It comes from the motion the song’s bring. Letting the rolling tom patterns, opening choruses, suspended guitar textures, and Barber’s ability to let a vocal line strain slightly against the groove without losing the story underneath it [...]
by Shannon Smith
Grace Ives has spent the past several years turning archetypal formats like the nursery rhyme, the ringtone, and the nine-to-five into a repertoire of oblique pop standards. Her 2022 breakthrough, Janky Star, captured the raw, youthful excitement of a newcomer, praised by critics for its experimental edge. Three years later, Girlfriend arrives as a more confident, cohesive statement. As Ives herself put it, looking back on the earlier record: “I was a baby.”
The album’s cumulative effect is of belting to the radio in your car, a high-drama pop monument to trying, flopping, and trying [...]
