Jayson Greene

Dec 11, 2024 | hearingthings.co | Jayson Greene

Last week, I huddled alongside 49 souls—the maximum allowed by the fire code—in the basement of Harlem’s Church of the Intercession. Four members of the contemporary choral ensemble Ekmeles filed into the low-lit crypt, along with their director, the baritone Jeffrey Gavett. They faced us soberly and then began to sing composer David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion, a secular rewrite of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion that puts Hans Christian Andersen’s poor freezing orphan girl in the role of Jesus.

Nov 4, 2024 | hearingthings.co | Jayson Greene

Phil Elverum’s writing deals in constants: The huge Earth, his tiny confusion, the certainty that we will all die. He articulates these ideas in a quiet, conversational voice against music that gently encourages disorientation. Each of his records captures a specific moment in his life, and his work resembles journaling—snapshots of ephemeral mind states. Elverum doesn’t guide you through his music; he accompanies you inside it.

Mar 21, 2024 | pitchfork.com | Jayson Greene

Before Saint Cloud, the scale of Waxahatchee’s music matched the intimate venues it was often found in—living rooms full of friends, small corner stages, crowded basement venues with iffy plumbing. But on her 2020 album, which Katie Crutchfield recently estimated doubled the size of her audience, she burned the fog off of her arrangements and raised her voice. The sound that emerged was closer in spirit to Americana than late-’90s indie rock.

Mar 21, 2024 | flipboard.com | Jayson Greene

GloRilla Announces Her New Song, Shares Release Date And Raunchy Cover ArtFans will be able to hear the song in full next month. After breaking through in 2022 with songs like "Tomorrow 2" and "F.N.F" that eventually made up …

Oct 17, 2023 | pitchfork.com | Jayson Greene

Over my 15-year career as a music critic, I’ve devoted thousands of hours to the art of translating music, imperfectly, into words. Now, thanks to an AI tool from Google called MusicLM, I can translate words, imperfectly, into music. The results can be startling. For fun, I tried feeding in some prompts from Pitchfork’s album reviews. Here are just a few words that a writer recently used to describe a song: “arpeggiated synths and light-up dancefloor grooves.” Simple, right? Effective.