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6 days ago | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
Did anyone ask for an electroclash revival? Was it ever gone so long that it required one? I have my own answers to these questions, but Sextile provide theirs in the title of their fourth studio LP: yes, please. The Los Angeles trio sound fully divorced from the shoegaze-swirled garage rock that founding members Brady Keehn and Melissa Scaduto first brought to market.
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3 weeks ago | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
Britpop’s original army of one-name rock acts—Oasis, Blur, Suede, Pulp—had players and fans who thrived on conflict and snarl. Throughout the 1990s a new strand of mostly one-name UK bands formed—Travis, Keane, Doves, Coldplay—and swelled in popularity as the century turned, constituting the post-Britpop movement and its softer, more yearning sounds. Obsessed as they were with relationships and heartbreaks, they were emo-coded without the punk screaming or scenester uniforms.
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4 weeks ago | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
To have Malian virtuoso Salif Keita and his closest confidants tell it, So Kono is an album that probably should not have happened. His interest in music, and prohibition to pursue it in his come country because of prejudices about his being born albino, pushed him away from his royal birthright in Africa long ago, but fortunately for the rest of the world these didn’t stop him from a career as the “golden voice” of the continent.
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1 month 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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1 month 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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2 months 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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2 months 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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Jan 26, 2025 | 
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?
