Pop reviews and more!
I didn’t expect a song written for kids to get under my skin, but “Something Real” did, and I’ve been trying to work out why for a couple of days now. Part of it is Marsha Swanson herself. She’s spent years doing psychologically informed creative work with children and families, in schools and therapeutic settings, …
Bushman doesn’t waste time getting to the point on “Reggae In Nashville.” The opening bars pull from a well worn reggae blueprint, the kind Bob Marley and Peter Tosh built decades ago, but there’s a warmth here that feels lived in rather than borrowed. What stands out first is the restraint. Bushman could have leaned …
Thomas Cole wrote a whole song about not shaving, and somehow it works better than it has any right to. “Stubble,” out now, opens with the kind of chorus that gets stuck whether you want it there or not. You will catch yourself humming it before you have even learned the actual words, which is …
“Panic Is the Norm,” out now from Nathan Bryce and Loaded Dice, started as her words. Crockett wrote the lyrics from her own experience as a widowed mother, and instead of turning that into something heavy or sad, she wrote it mean and funny, the kind of humor you only get after life has knocked …
Forget slow builds, everyone claims they do slow builds. Cloud actually pulls it off. “Nobody’s Dreaming” is out now, and it spends its opening seconds doing almost nothing, a synth line, some air, barely a pulse. Then it starts stacking harmonics on top of harmonics until the whole thing tips over into something enormous, and …