The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon Brings His Baroque Fashion to the Conversation
With the release of Rainy Sunday Afternoon, The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon discusses his music and deceptive personas – his and others’.
baroque pop
Kate Bush Taught Pop How to Dream with ‘Hounds of Love’
If Kate Bush’s The Dreaming is a hellscape of bizarre fragmentation and nightmarish beauty, Hounds of Love teaches pop how to dream and capture those contradictions in sound.
Black Country New Road’s New LP Skews Refreshingly Feminine
Black Country New Road’s new LP embraces ornate baroque pop, shifting from raw intensity to intricate melancholy. Brilliant yet overstuffed, it rewards patience.
The Zombies’ Inhuman Staying Power
The Zombies only had a couple of hit songs, yet Robin Platts’ Times and Seasons shows their almost inhuman staying power to this day.
Moses Sumney’s ‘Blackalachia’ and the Forest
In Moses Sumney’s beautiful 2021 performance film Blackalachia, the forest is a friend, a threat, a looming watcher, and an extension of the narrator’s person.
Graeme Thomson’s Revised ‘Under the Ivy’ Captures Kate Bush’s Complexity
While Kate Bush’s work and life defy clichés and easy categorization, Graeme Thomson chronicles her story while conveying its inherent ambiguity and mystery.
Arcade Fire’s ‘Funeral’ Still Amazes As a Conceptual Statement
On Funeral, Arcade Fire found catharsis in music while processing grief for the loss of loved ones. As a result, they shifted the course of indie rock.
Moses Sumney’s Self-Aware Icarus
With 2017’s Aromanticism, Moses Sumney negotiates the self as body and spirit and attempts to reconcile his emotions and sexuality with his religion.
The Decemberists’ New LP Offers a Unified Whole
The Decemberists’ As It Ever Was, So It Will Be indulges the right indulgences (mostly) but makes space for the group to speak with tenderness and gravitas.
The Decemberists’ New LP Is a Return to Form
The Decemberists straddle between the exotic and quotidian, the real and imagined, to reveal that existence is most interesting when lived in a liminal state.
Baroque Pop Songstress Margo Guryan Immortalized in New Boxed Set
With her keen feel for tone, phrasings, tension, presence, and lyrics that cut, Margo Guryan is synonymous with the most sophisticated 1960s songcraft.
Beth Gibbons Ventures Out on ‘Lives Outgrown’
Lives Outgrown seems like an outgrowth of where Beth Gibbons’ mind and talents have taken her in the past decade, which is to ruminate on how life is a vapor.