On August 26, 2022, “the unusual quartet Battle Trance, comprised of four wildly talented tenor saxophonists” (NPR), releases Green of Winter, the followup to 2016’s Blade of Love, one of the “20 Best Avant Albums of the year” (Rolling Stone), a record featuring “three adventurously dense movements … that maintain a focused sense of restraint and melody throughout” (Pitchfork).
On Green of Winter, Battle Trance—a quartet that lives and works and plays in the seams between contemporary classical and avant-garde jazz—delves deeper into their signature musical language, working intimately with the connection between the human body and the human breath, a connection that composer Travis Laplante hones as a Qigong practitioner; by using the technique of circular breathing to create hypnotic waves of sound and layered saxophone multiphonics, or chords, Battle Trance weaves intricate, ancient textures that shed fresh light on the saxophone as an ensemble instrument.
Green of Winter, the third album in a New Amsterdam Records trilogy featuring both Blade of Love and 2014’s Palace of Wind, is a work of beauty and mystery, a musical harvest cultivated from the deep friendship between Battle Trance’s four members, Travis Laplante, Patrick Breiner, Matt Nelson, and Jeremy Viner—“America’s favorite tenor saxophone quartet” (Kenny G*)—as they celebrate their tenth anniversary as an ensemble.

这首曲子出自美剧《Flashpoint》第二季第一集片尾曲，歌手Kim Taylor来自美国俄亥俄州的辛辛那提，整首曲子慵懒、充满淡淡的情调，不急不缓，又不失韵味。

Melissa Moore was fired from Texas black metallers Absu in 2017. When she came out as transgender to her bandmates, she figured she would have their support in this most vulnerable moment of her life. Instead, every member of Absu but one shunned her. Moore was dismissed via text message under the claim she had “fired herself” with “her decision.”
Undeterred by the collapse of Absu, Moore and Absu touring drummer Grzesiek Czapla (the lone member of the band who supported her transition) set in motion to activate Sonja, a project they started in 2014. Bassist Ben Brand eventually joined the fold, cementing a three-piece lineup that eschews traditional subgenres for a nuanced, hookladen, passionate and powerful display of heavy rock/metal on their first full-length and Cruz Del Sur Music debut, Loud Arriver.
Loud Arriver was recorded in 2019 at Creep Recording Studio in Philadelphia with Dan Kishbaugh. Its vocals were tracked in 2020 at the same studio but with acclaimed producer Arthur Rizk (Cavalera Conspiracy, Enforced, Kreator). Loud Arriver marks the first time that Moore has released a full-length album in ten years and also marks her debut as lead vocalist. It is a cathartic event for Moore: A lot of the music she wrote in that period is now lost due to the adverse circumstances surrounding her gender, but Sonja forged ahead. The global pandemic exacerbated the wait to release Loud Arriver but allowed Moore and her bandmates to put additional energy into the album under the concept of “go big or go home.”
Indeed, Loud Arriver is stacked with big, anthemic songs fitting Moore’s impassioned vocal delivery and punctuating guitar work. Through the deft use of minor, melodic-minor and harmonic keys, Moore’s guitar-playing channels an atmosphere of urgency and abandon, reflecting the tumultuous period of her transition where hostility and fear greeted her at every corner. Moore’s lyrics delve further into these topics, addressing the period she lived her life in secret and self-suppression that led to sorrow and dissociation. And her lyrics also touch upon her desire to retaliate upon those who threaten her very existence for being transgender.
Loud Arriver is the result of the intense and demanding vision the members of Sonja had from the day they started. It is the embodiment of true metal and rock ‘n’ roll with nothing held back. It is only fitting, then, that Moore establishes Sonja’s mission statement: “We aren’t interlopers. We’ve been here all along. Now that we have passed step one, we are locked and loaded and have a massive kingdom to overthrow.”

Birefringence by Jute Gyte, released 01 July 2019

Several tracks on this album draw from the aleatorically generated 24-note series 0, 22, 14, 21, 2, 16, 8, 3, 18, 9, 4, 7, 19, 20, 5, 12, 1, 11, 13, 15, 10, 17, 23, 6. In "Angelus Novus", all pitches and some rhythms are serialized; in "Prosopons" and "The Unformed Volcanic Earth", some pitches are serialized. "New Plastic" is a piece for four guitars in which all pitches, rhythms, and ~372 effect parameters are serialized. Otherwise, this album was written more freely than the last few.
The central portion of "Dissected Grace" is drawn from William Blake's Europe: A Prophecy. This album is additionally indebted to Morag Josephine Grant's Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics; Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day; Carlo Michelstaedter's Persuasion & Rhetoric; Keiji Nishitani's The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism; Walter Benjamin; György Lukács; James Tenney; Robinson Jeffers.

Brittney Parks’ <i>Athena</i> was one of the more interesting albums of 2019. <i>Natural Brown Prom Queen</i> is better. Not only does Parks—aka the LA-based singer, songwriter, and violinist Sudan Archives—sound more idiosyncratic, but she’s able to wield her idiosyncrasies with more power and purpose. It’s catchy but not exactly pop (“Home Maker”), embodied but not exactly R&B (“Ciara”), weird without ever being confrontational (“It’s Already Done”), and it rides the line between live sound and electronic manipulation like it didn’t exist. She wants to practice self-care (“Selfish Soul”), but she also just wants to “have my titties out” (“NBPQ [Topless]”), and over the course of 55 minutes, she makes you wonder if those aren’t at least sometimes the same thing. And the album’s sheer variety isn’t so much an expression of what Parks wants to try as the multitudes she already contains.

The Last Poets is the debut spoken word album, released in 1970, by The Last Poets.
The song "Wake Up, Niggers" is featured on the Performance soundtrack album, also released in 1970.

Steve Roach is an American composer and performer of ambient and electronic music, whose recordings are informed by his impressions of environment, perception, flow and space. His work has been influential in the trance and new-age genres.

那個年代連Dark Entry裡的LMF前身Lazy Mother Fxxker也在唱Go。

In a world of immediacy, speed, and the here and now, we seem to have lost the trail of those music groups that caress you, that cradle you, that feel like they accompany our sadness and turn it into something beautiful. What groups like GALAXIE 500, RED HOUSE PAINTERS, LOW, COCTEAU TWINS, MAZZY STAR, or more recently CIGARETTES AFTER SEX, WARAHENEGE and Joni do. That’s why we listen to each new song from BUBBLE TEA AND CIGARETTES like a gift, an opportunity, a narcotic journey to the deepest part of our feelings. That’s how we have experienced each of their five singles that have been released over the past year or so, and now it’s time to really celebrate, because the time has come for Andi and Kat’s first album, “There’s Nothing But Pleasure”.
This is a very special release, both on vinyl, CD formats and digital, which includes those five singles and three marvelous previously unreleased tracks. The album delves deeper into the preciousness that can be found in silence, of the magic of slow tempos, that seem to beat at the same pace as our heart. Where Andi and Kat’s voices, the reverb, the delays, the crystalline guitars all create a false sense of fragility, that everything could break at any given moment, of containment, and of course, of emotion. The violins on “Cigarette Butt” (exciting); the martial rhythm of “He Asked Me To Quit Smoking” which reminds us of some of the saddest moments of Dusty Springfield; the desertic evocation of “Santa Mónica” that Chris Isaak would have loved to have written. The melodic perfection, that guitar arrangement and the impossible title, “Go Downstairs To The Blue Moon, Buy Some Fried Chicken”, the fifties spirit of “Leap”, the dreamy nostalgia of “Liz” and the surreal feeling of “5AM Empanada With You”. With nocturnal themes, and where cigarette smoke seems to take on a sonic quality, full of hedonism, the songs also benefit from the great mixing work of Anthony "Rocky" Gallo (Norah Jones, Cat Power, THE XX, CIGARETTES AFTER SEX, THE KILLERS, THE CLIENTELE…) and the mastering of Greg Calbi (Stevie Wonder, John Lennon, David Bowie, TAME IMPALA, ARCADE FIRE, St. Vincent, PERFUME GENIUS, BLONDIE, Aretha Franklin).
And that “There’s Nothing But Pleasure”, where they pull out their most spatial facet, evoking a cosmic Francis Lai and his marvelous soundtracks, or a fully effervescent BEACH HOUSE, a tour de force that builds up almost without our realizing it, and in just three minutes places us at the edge of a cliff. We look down and everything is so pretty. We can’t give up. We have to jump, and fly, and hit play again, without realizing that we have already done it. Because beyond the typical association between sadness and slow tempos, they show us pleasure, a sense of humor, dreaminess, and so much beauty. And that is something that very few know how to give.
And of course, after enjoying the narcotic effects of listening to the album, you can enjoy all the videos they have released these months with their various singles. There is another exciting journey in them.

Music and lyrics
In Full Gear is a double album that draws on various influences in its hip hop style, including R&B, jazz, dancehall reggae, and rock influences. It also incorporates beat-boxing, sampling technology, and live band performance.
"Freedom or Death" and "Talkin' All That Jazz" discuss credos of revolution and sampling, respectively.On "Float On", a remake of The Floaters' 1977 song of the same name, rapper Wise envisions "a woman with a realistic imagination, a woman who thinks for herself, whose thoughts are bold and free"
Critical reception
In a contemporary review for The Village Voice, music critic Robert Christgau found the "well-meaning" band merely competent on the album's first half, which had a musically aimless "A.F.R.I.C.A." and a remake of "Float On" that was "even ickier than the original." He was more enthusiastic about its second half and wrote that it succeeds on "a camaraderie that reaches deeper than the usual homeboy bonding."
In his own list for the Pazz & Jop critics poll, Christgau named "Talkin' All That Jazz" the seventeenth best single of 1988.

Origami Angel are a bit of an oddball band. A scattered discography, including an EP based on the 3rd generation of Pokemon games and a debut EP that was more soft-acoustic-emo than the explosive energy of their recent output, makes them a hard band to *place*. Somewhere between the snotty, heartfelt emo-punk of Remo Drive and the hyper-mathy, clean pop punk of outfits like Tiny Moving Parts, the band's sound is familiar, but not instantly analogous to any of the big dogs in the pop-rock/pop-punk scene. They're relatively unknown too, with Somewhere City being their first full length release, following their eclectic (to say the least) collection of EPs and splits. They'd seem unlikely candidates then, to offer up a genuinely brilliant and creative effort to a blend of subgenres that, in all honesty, are fading from the heydays of the 2000s and early 2010s.
But with Somewhere City, that's exactly what they've done.
To manage the expectations of more discerning listeners, much like Remo Drive's 2017 debut, this record isn't the Ok Computer of emo punk. It's not treading any totally unfamiliar territory, and it's likely not the most polished collection of songs to ever grace your eardrums. What Origami Angel do on this record, however, is take a genre that has largely stagnated, and approached it with such blind optimism, enthusiasm and genuinely interesting songwriting flourishes that new life is found from nowhere. The willingness to take fairly conventional ideas and play with them, making something unexpected is possibly the band's biggest strength. From 'Doctor Whomst's almost easycore-ish fight riff close, to the danceable boppyness of '24 Hour Drive-Thru' and the blast beats that rip through the end of '666 Flags', no song is without some kind of twist or turn that is a complete departure from what you might expect.
There's some genuinely strong songwriting here too - 'Say Less' has an utterly infections earworm of a chorus, whilst the hyper-peppy of optimism of 'Find Your Throne', whilst not the most creatively written track on the record, is undeniably catchy. The closing track is an absolute class act in this regard - nothing that special until the halfway mark, at which the band reincorporate pretty much every hook of the rest of the record into a soaring, multilayered polyphony that ties the whole of Somewhere City into incredibly satisfying harmony. The rhythmic variety on this record really can't be emphasised enough, either. 'The Title Track' is almost borders on some kind of jazz-emo-punk fusion with it's commitment to seemingly relentless syncopation, and the intricacies of the band's TMP-style tapped noodling are well placed and impressive, although some may find the recurrence of these flourishes a little excessive. Perhaps the best example of this working is on the opener, 'Welcome to...', where a distinctly midwest emo flavoured ostinato gives way to an affirming, steadily building crescendo to kick the record off to an anthemic start.
The instrumental performances are fantastic; the drums are tight, the guitar is snappy and has a great crunch to its tone. Ryland Heagy's vocal performance is sassy, emotional and vibrant in equal measure, thankfully without the return of the half-rapped style that cramped the style of the closer to their Gen 3 EP. With these positives said, the mix feels just a little thin on the bottom end, and a couple of tracks like 'Escape Rope' sometimes feel a bit scooped out in their verse passages, but this issue isn't big enough to have much of an impact on the overall listening experience. Lyrically, the record indulges some pretty well trodden themes of loneliness, losing and finding sense of self and belonging, but with a general trend to positivity and optimism - a breath of fresh air in a genre with slightly more self-pitying lyrical trends. Whilst the uncompromising youthfulness of the lyrics could be a little tiring for those already exhausted by the sensibilities of pop-punk, they're by no means bad enough to mar an altogether surprisingly polished and coherent take on the genre.
Again, it has to be emphasised that for all this record's brilliant use of rhythm, variety, fantastic songwriting and entertaining twists on well-trodden concepts, this isn't anything entirely new. If you come in to Origami Angel expecting an avant-garde take on pop-punk you might leave disappointed. But if you suspend your cynicism for just half an hour, and let Ryland Heagy and Pat Doherty's frenetic, bright, surprisingly fresh, self-branded 'emo-pop' in to your eardrums, you might just come out the other end thinking Origami Angel have dropped the best record the genre has seen this year.

Vinyl LP pressing. 2010 release from the Philadelphia Indie Pop band. If there ever was an album "for the fans", it is Autumn, Again. The band is keen to stress that this is not a glimpse of what lies ahead, but rather document of where they have been and what they have accomplished. A big "thank you" to the fans that have come on board over the years and everyone who came to shows and made the past year so incredible for the band. 11 tracks.