Arcade Fire — Funeral

8/10I can’t remember any album getting more immediate praise in the last couple of decades than The Arcade Fire’s Funeral. Take a glance at Metacritic’s compilation of its reviews–there are eight 10’s. Listening to their music, I couldn’t help feeling like I was at a high school pep rally, slightly excited, but experiencing something I

The Appleseed Cast — Middle States

8/10 Predicting which direction The Appleseed Cast will go at any given moment is pretty much impossible. I guess this year they realized they hadn’t released an EP before, so now was the time. EP’s are usually pretty hit and miss, as the shortage of material often makes the purchase seem wasteful. Of course, if you

The Appleseed Cast — Sagarmatha

9/10 It takes guts to try something new with every album, and more importantly, quite a bit of skill to make innovation work every time. There is one band that does not find this difficult. The Appleseed Cast use few words on Sagarmatha, and I’ll try to do the same in this review. Instrumentals have

The Appleseed Cast — Peregrine

8/10 After the more conservative musical stylings of Two Conversations, The Appleseed Cast’s fans begged for a return to the experimentation of the bands previous works. They definitely got that with Peregrine, one of the hardest to define works in The Appleseed Cast’s catalog. Peregrine starts off with a promisingly huge instrumental, a good sign

The Appleseed Cast — Two Conversations

8/10I’m not sure if I’ve ever been as disappointed on a first listen as I was during my introduction to The Appleseed Cast’s Two Conversations. How could a band that had just explored the vastness and depth of the ocean, then bottled the very essence of autumn and pressed it to plastic, content themselves with

The Appleseed Cast — Lost Songs

8/10 So you’ve just done something musically no one else ever has, surely reached an artistic pinnacle, and have no idea where to go next. What do you do? The Appleseed Cast decided to revisit a similar point in their career, and resurrect songs they’d previously left to die. All nine tracks on Lost Songs

The Appleseed Cast — Low Level Owl: Volume 2

10/10 So you walk deeper into the woods, comforted by the calming newness of your experience. For a while you are at peace, but the emotions of the experience overcome you, and every regret or joy you’ve ever felt swells outward and threatens to engulf. The wind picks up and you don’t understand how the

The Appleseed Cast — Low Level Owl: Volume 1

10/10 So you walk into the woods to clear your head. It is autumn and everything is beautiful. You immediately forget your worries and begin to relax, but after a while you realize you don’t recognize any familiar landmarks outside the rhythm of your own footsteps. You are lost, and this reminds you of everything

Quick Update

Just listened to the new The Weeknd mixtape, Thursday, on my headphones at work. Now my desk is pregnant.

The Appleseed Cast — Mare Vitalis

10/10 Emotion can be a difficult thing to convey. It should be timeless and universal, but it so often comes across as cheesy, or worse, fake. Creating rock music that sounds original and inventive can be difficult, as well. Beside the simple fact that almost everything has already been done, just arbitrarily doing something to