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1 week ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Jeremy Winograd
Both raised Southern Baptist, Julien Baker and Mackenzie Scott (a.k.a. Torres) have taken similar paths, breaking free of the conservative environs of their childhoods and becoming singer-songwriters acclaimed for their brawny guitar riffs and queer self-expression. But, it turns out, you just can’t take the South out of the coastal indie darlings. On Send a Prayer My Way, their first album as a duo, Baker and Scott reclaim the honky-tonk music they grew up on.
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1 month ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Jeremy Winograd
Lucy Dacus has a knack for taking small, seemingly insignificant details—a car ride, a drink at a bar, an adolescent make-out session—and magnifying them into moments of dramatic self-revelation. Despite its weighty title, though, the singer-songwriter’s fourth studio album, Forever Is a Feeling, takes a less theatrical approach to the quotidian.
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2 months ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Jeremy Winograd
Patterson Hood has on several occasions claimed that his favorite album is Todd Rundgren’s sprawling 1972 avant-pop opus Something/Anything? It’s an influence that’s never been especially detectable in his music, to put it lightly.
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2 months ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Jeremy Winograd
On her sixth studio album, Forever, Lilly Hiatt explores themes of isolation, self-identity, and domestic bliss. Based on that description, you might think you know what it sounds like: quiet, intimate, and replete with sparse acoustic finger-picking and tenderly sung, soul-baring lyrics. While Hiatt has always been an exceptionally vulnerable songwriter, what Forever adds to her repertoire is its unrelenting barrage of brawling guitars, punkish attitude, and hopped-up melodicism.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Jeremy Winograd
Father John Misty is a withering social commentator who casts wry aspersions on the ludicrousness of modern life, often depicted in funhouse proportions with the aid of winkingly florid arrangements.
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Sep 2, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Jeremy Winograd
Whether as the lead guitarist for Wednesday, the Asheville band fronted by ex-girlfriend Karly Hartzman, or backing up Katie Crutchfield on Waxahatchee’s Tigers Blood, MJ Lenderman seems to thrive on collaboration. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that, on this third solo album, Manning Fireworks, he sounds disgusted with others to the point of wanting to be left alone forever.
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Jeremy Winograd
Fittingly for an album named after an imaginary realm she invented as a child, Beatrice Laus’s sophomore effort as Beabadoobee, 2022’s Beatopia, was eccentric, unpredictable, and a bit fantastical, as if its songs were emanating like rays of light from a shimmery dreamworld sculpted out of ’90s indie-rock fuzz and bedroom pop.
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Jul 8, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Jeremy Winograd
Cassandra Jenkins isn’t much of a rock-‘n’-roll singer. “Clams Casino,” the second track on the Brooklyn singer-songwriter’s third studio album, My Light, My Destroyer, is the zippiest rocker she’s penned to date, but her whispercore vocals—so pitch-perfect on the album’s opener, the hazy morning reverie that is “Devotion”—clash with the song’s jagged electric guitars and chugging rhythm.
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Jul 8, 2024 | 
newsbreak.com | Jeremy Winograd
Welcome to NewsBreak, an open platform where diverse perspectives converge. Most of our content comes from established publications and journalists, as well as from our extensive network of tens of thousands of creators who contribute to our platform. We empower individuals to share insightful viewpoints through short posts and comments.
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Apr 1, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Jeremy Winograd
Even during their early 2010s commercial peak, when outside producers, pop-funk influences, and expanded instrumentation transformed them into a genuine mainstream act, the Black Keys’s songs were still full of empty space. Listening to “Tighten Up” or “Lonely Boy” today, it’s striking how spare they sound. They’re slick but not overproduced.
