Showing 1 - 10 of 43
Just hold on and keep pedalling
B Magazine, Chanun Poomsawai, Published on 16/02/2020
» "We were all really jaded by the end of the last album. We'd done four albums in five years and it'd pretty much been non-stop. You do start to lose the love of it,"
Indie rock done right
B Magazine, Chanun Poomsawai, Published on 09/02/2020
» "When I was 18/ Someone got stabbed in a church/ But I got used to it/ And forgave all the ways and the names/ It was so long ago, anyways," vocalist Jeremy Gaudet recounts on Murder In The Cathedral, the opening track to Kiwi Jr.'s debut album, Football Money. The vivid songwriting, buoyed by his bandmates' jangly instrumentation, is delivered with the kind of drawl that would have you thinking fondly of Pavement's Stephen Malkmus and The Strokes as well as the Modern Lovers' Jonathan Richman and Parquet Courts' Andrew Savage.
Find your inner mystic
B Magazine, Chanun Poomsawai, Published on 02/02/2020
» It's been nearly half-a-decade since Dan Deacon's last album, Gliss Riffer, was unleashed onto the world. On that acclaimed 2015 release, the Baltimore-based composer tackled and found solace in the finality of life through head-spinning highlights like When I Was Done Dying and Sheathed Wings. It was also the first album since his debut LP, Spiderman Of The Rings, that he recorded and produced himself.
Pegged For Greatness
B Magazine, Chanun Poomsawai, Published on 11/08/2019
» Not too long ago, a conversation we had surrounding rising South Korean DJ Peggy Gou led to the general consensus that she was "a fashion DJ". While necessarily not an overt affront, "fashion DJ" seems to connote inferiority -- a lesser kind of DJ who banks on his/her looks rather than musical skills. Given Gou's meteoric rise and her inevitable involvement in the fashion world (she went to fashion school, after all), it's easy to dismiss her musicianship altogether and forget that she's accomplished so much more than just landing luxury ad campaigns.
From Tuesday to Saturday
B Magazine, Chanun Poomsawai, Published on 30/06/2019
» Who would have thought that a garden-variety verse like "Got the club goin' up, on a Tuesday/ Got your girl in the cut and she choosey" would blow up and inspire countless Vines endless memes? Well, no one really -- except for Canadian rapper Drake who loved it so much he gave it a remix (Club Goin' Up On A Tuesday) complete with his own additional verse. Lauded as 2014's "summertime sleeper hit", the song single-handedly launched Atlanta artist Makonnen Sheran, aka iLoveMakonnen, into the Atlanta rap scene, not to mention earning him a Grammy nomination for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration. For him, Drake's endorsement was indeed a godsend.
From Belize with love
B Magazine, Chanun Poomsawai, Published on 26/05/2019
» Ariel Zetina may be best known as one of Chicago's fiercest DJs (the Mother of the Windy City Club Scene, as some have suitably appointed her), but she's more than meets the eye. Having come from a theatre and poetry background, the American-Belizean artist is well-versed in cutting-edge performance art. In fact, her first foray into music-making was born out of necessity, simply because she couldn't find a piece of music that would fit a show she was working on as part of collaborative performance art group Witch Hazel. After relocating to Chicago some years later, she finally found her place and essentially herself in the city's thriving queer/trans club scene, which provided her with the impetus to fuse house and techno sounds with her own multicultural flavours.
When sleaze gets slick
B Magazine, Chanun Poomsawai, Published on 05/05/2019
» Fat White Family, for the uninitiated, are a South London group trading in all manners of classic punk depravities, rock'n'roll drug habits and songs with imaginatively risqué titles (Cream Of The Young, Is It Raining In Your Mouth?, Bomb Disneyland). Led by founding frontman Lias Saoudi, the band is notorious for their outrageous live gigs, where shocking antics and nudity are not uncommon. As a band, this collective transgression is the unique selling point upon which their 2013 debut album Champagne Holocaust and its follow-up Songs For Our Mothers hinged. It's also the very factor that contributed to "the sort of classic stereotypical drug meltdown", as Lias puts it in his recent interview with Noisey, which led to them getting dropped by US-based Fat Possum Records.
Fear No More
B Magazine, Chanun Poomsawai, Published on 17/02/2019
» After providing the chart-topping main theme songs alongside Japanese composer Yoko Shimomura for Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, Utada Hikaru returns for the video game series' latest instalment -- this time with EDM producer and self-confessed Kingdom Hearts fan Skrillex in the fold. Titled Face My Fears, the four-track EP marks the continual, almost two-decade-long collaboration between Hikaru and game director Tetsuya Nomura that first began prior to the release of the first game in the early 2000s.
The Art of Growing Old
B Magazine, Chanun Poomsawai, Published on 03/02/2019
» "Attending an unplanned party/ Never ready, didn't really wanna come/ Saying 'hello' to acquaintances/ Gotta be careful not to smile too much/ It just wouldn't be appropriate," without knowing the track's title, the opening verse of The Charapaabs' debut single, Sala Kon Sao (Funeral Party), reads like something of a typical introvert's diary. As the second verse arrives, it becomes clear that the aforementioned "party" is actually a funeral where "the host refrains from making an appearance" (worth noting a clever wordplay here -- ook long, literally "out of coffin", is used instead of ook rong, which is a Thai expression meaning to make an appearance).
When good intentions backfire
B Magazine, Chanun Poomsawai, Published on 06/01/2019
» "Sometimes/ It falls upon a generation/ To be great/ I ask all humanity now/ To rise up/ Then we can all stand/ With our heads/ Held high," begins the Chris Martin-curated Global Citizen EP 1 with opener Rise Up featuring an excerpt from Nelson Mandela's now-iconic "Make Poverty History" speech. It's an apt start given the wholesome intentions of this EP, although it feels slightly jarring to hear one of the world's greatest speeches getting paired with the euphoric synths supplied here by the Norwegian production behemoth Stargate. The song is clearly engineered for a stadium/festival setting, so casual listening might not be the best way to approach what would otherwise be a stirring anthem.