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2 weeks ago | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
Prior Backxwash albums like I Lie Here Buried with My Rings and My Dresses found Canada’s Ashanti Mutinta methodically smothering her rap with death-metal screams and clanging percussion loops. On her newest LP Only Dust Remains, she drops that industrialized shroud of production in favor of more accessible trap sampling and arrangements meant for a proper band. In clarifying the medium, Backxwash ends up clarifying her message.
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3 weeks ago | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
For the decade (give or take) when revival movements started arriving like alien invaders, what would revivalism of the 2000s itself sound like? Rap and electronic music have certainly progressed to new forms and revisions. Among subgenres, both post-punk and emo seem to have subsumed their own revivals so everything new there is old again.
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1 month ago | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
Off and on throughout his career, the late film director Jonathan Demme made some intriguing connections to music. These stretched from placing A-list actress Meryl Streep in the unlikely role of a rock star reconciling with her family in 2015’s Ricki and the Flash (the last movie he directed before his death) all the way back to music video and movie work through the 1980s for the likes of New Order, the Sun City project, and most famously Talking Heads.
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1 month ago | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
It feels uncommon to see an academic project lifted up to the level of commercially available music, so Point Contact as an artist and their LP A Fleeting Point in Terrifying Beauty collectively pique the curious ear. The ensemble is led by Jo Wills, who has kept himself busiest as cofounder of the WW Records label and making electronic music as Old Man Diode.
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1 month ago | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
Will Wiesenfeld’s work as Baths has long hewed close to the sounds we first heard from him when he broke out with Cerulean in 2010: the kind of jagged neosoul, barely danceable electronica, and cracked hip-hop derivatives found on his original home label Anticon as well as familiars like Warp and Stones Throw. It was packed to the rafters with sonic manipulation, and rightly celebrated for it, but it feels like that obscured much of the storytelling Wiesenfeld wanted to share.
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2 months ago | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
America’s pop culture equivalent of a tennis player taking down the Grand Slam of pro tournaments, a performer completes what’s known as the EGOT when their career includes winning an Emmy Award for television, a Grammy Award for music, an Oscar (Academy Award) for film, and a Tony Award for theatre. There are just 21 members of this exclusive club, first established when producer and composer Richard Rodgers completed his set with an Emmy win in 1962.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
From paintings informing symphonies to artists’ stories told through modern conceits like mixtapes and musicals, fine art has inspired musicians for centuries. In the moment or, at worst, in hindsight we can understand most of these connections between sight and sound. But how would one first think to square music with Edvard Munch, one of art’s great one-hit wonders outside his home nation of Norway?
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
Conveying emotion, searching for community and positive reinforcement, establishing environments for collaboration, connecting through shared experience—there are few better tools than music for the construction and promotion of empathy and its component parts. And there are few better, more consistent constructors of empathy through music than Red Hot Organization, who have used it for more than three decades to press issues related tp HIV/AIDS care and awareness worldwide.
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Nov 3, 2024 | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
In order to talk about The Cure in this moment—as Songs of a Lost World brings the legendary goth pioneers back to shelves and streaming after a 16-year absence—I have to first talk briefly about one of the artists they’ve most famously informed. This new LP feels like a long-form interpretation of the same kind of recontextualization we heard with “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
You know something is going right when an album would make you smile constantly if you could actually keep your jaw from falling on the floor. So ran my reaction to Honey, the new album from Ontario producer Dan Snaith under his most prolific and successful Caribou stage name. Snaith can clearly throw down a banger at any given moment, but this largest section of his discography isn’t nearly as oriented around the dancefloor as it is languid breakbeats and occasional proper singer-songwriting.
