Sean Arison
We Have a Map of the Piano – múm
16 June 2020
“We Have a Map of the Piano” embraces the listener like a warm blanket. Múm mixes warm synths and found acoustics to sculpt a soundscape which makes the listener feel safe, awake, alive, and renewed…
I Lost Something in the Hills – Sibylle Baier
12 May 2020
“Every time I shed tears In the last past years
When I pass through the hills Oh, what images return
Oh, I yearn For the roots of the woods
That origin of all my strong and strange moods
I lost something in the hills I lost something in the hills”
Bo Diddley – Bo Diddley
22 March 2020
Bum da dum bum ba dum bum. Bo Diddley, nicknamed “The Originator”, is often attributed much credit towards the solidification of rock and roll as a genre…
Deepest Roots – Gabrielle Zwi
7 October 2019
Gabrielle Zwi is an amazing artist local to the D.C. area and my personal friend. Her newest song, “Deepest Roots” captures the empowering, freeing rebirth through expanded solace recycled into resolution…
The Ephemeral Bluebell – Bibio
7 August 2019
Ephemerality is defined as the state of something that lasts for only a short period of time. It is commonly used to describe the passing of the seasons and the bloom and decay of nature…
Franklin’s Tower – The Grateful Dead
31 July 2019
Like any good song by the Grateful Dead, the emotional quality of “Franklin’s Tower” dances and jumps with an almost supernal ability of wrenching happiness…
Dramamine – Modest Mouse
8 July 2019
“Traveling swallowing Dramamine”
Throughout “Dramamine” the listener is treated to twirling, smooth guitar tones and trenchant vocals backed by a downtempo rhythm able to stir the mind into a piercing lull. Named after an anti-nauseant and motion sickness opioid drug with side-effects of mood-altering drowsiness, “Dramamine” accordingly takes the listener out of whatever emotional, motion sickness-filled reality that they possess and into a trancelike state of sweeping tonal tide pools…
This Year – The Mountain Goats
26 June 2019
“I am going to make it through this year if it kills me”
Themes bursting out of the gates like flood, the Mountain Goats’ “This Year” captures the quintessence of running through the starting line of life head first onto a tightrope and somehow making it to the other side. Multiple hours after sunsets, the day before moving cities, the five to six hours between falling in love and having three papers due the next morning, Jon Darnelle and his band capture the feeling of the post-climactic, blindsiding, and bludgeoning normality that manages to keep life glued together in the best way possible…
John Taylor’s Month Away – King Creosote and Jon Hopkins
26 June 2019
Echoing softly through the lines of a story feeling far older than the one spoken, King Creosote and Jon Hopkins create a snowy retelling of the feeling of bittersweet imperfect but lasting self-confidence. “John Taylor’s Month Away” tells the tale of a reminiscent picture of comparative self awareness contrasting the singer’s current state of life with another of men embarking on a month-long seafaring voyage from the perspective of a swing park in Roome Beach, Scotland…