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1 week ago | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
Nothing in this life is promised, our next day is never guaranteed. This existential burden looms over our health broadly, but the reality is that anything can butterfly-effect anything else, choices and actions changing or eliminating our play, our work, our daily mundanities. Outside forces and internal conflicts came close to pushing British musician Simbi Ajikawo away from the art she loved to make as Little Simz.
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2 weeks ago | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
Brian Eno has been music’s perpetual motion machine for decades, staying busy elevating technology to art, tying sound to social issues, and imbuing media with algorithms allowing audio and video to lumber to life so they grow and change on their own. Over the last 30 years he’s teamed up with electronica acts, poets, prog-rockers and post-punks to expand his and their creative vocabulary.
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4 weeks ago | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
The electronic body music (EBM) movement is a decidedly un-American affair, in that most notable EBM has come from artists and countries outside of the United States. With Nine Inch Nails having graduated to superstar status from their industrial beginnings, and other bands like clipping.
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1 month ago | 
treblezine.com | Adam Blyweiss
One of the regular riffs on Radiohead is that they’re The Most Relentlessly Serious Band in the World. I mean, other contemporary contenders have at least put up a facade of an alternative, right? U2 had a bunch of fun little moments during their electro/industrial phase in the ‘90s, for example, and Rage Against the Machine’s politicized catalog is rife with glorious catharsis.
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1 month 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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2 months 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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2 months 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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2 months 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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2 months 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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Mar 18, 2025 | 
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.
