Paul Attard

1 week ago | slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard

Since reforming in 2010, Swans have made a habit of testing the patience of their audience in pursuit of transcendence, often rewarding that perseverance with profound and overpowering listening experiences. Birthing, a two-hour album with an average track length of about 16-and-a-half minutes, continues that tradition but is even slower, heavier, and more ominous.

2 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard

“You see, I’m just Marshall Mathers/I’m just a regular guy, I don’t know why all the fuss about me/Nobody ever gave a fuck before, all they did was doubt me/Now everybody wanna run they mouth and try to take shots at me.” These lines, which make up the chorus of “Marshall Mathers,” sung by Marshall Mathers on the 11th track of The Marshall Mathers LP, serve as the key to understanding the album. It’s the song that perfectly encapsulates its overall ethos.

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard

In his review of 2 Chainz and Lil Wayne’s Welcome 2 Collegrove, Slant’s Charles Lyons-Burt noted that the album’s main flaw was one “endemic to many sequels: It tries to be bigger and better but just ends up feeling lumbering and belabored.” Pinball II, the second collaborative album from Brooklyn rapper MIKE and producer Tony Seltzer, manages to sidestep that pitfall.

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard

The opening bars of “All These Worlds Are Yours,” a track on Billy Woods’s Golliwog, serve as a fitting distillation of the rapper’s worldview: “Today I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my home/The drone flew real low, no rush, real slow/He curled up into himself, a fetus in the womb, the womb was the Earth/Grenades landed at his feet, and he scrabbled in the dirt.” His is a surreal vision of modern life where violence is both literally distant and figuratively intimate, where...

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard

Nearly three years after its exclusive release on Stem Player, accompanied by a listening event at Miami’s LoanDepot Park, Kanye West’s Donda 2 has been unceremoniously dumped on streaming services, its reappearance marked by a livestream featuring known misogynist Sneako and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.