Cordavision Music Reviews

The cover used is gorgeous alternate art for this album and might be cover of the year for me. I’ve reviewed SAULT before, and I’ve liked pretty much everything the group has released. Only one out of a couple of the known members, Inflo, has come out of the shadows since nearly every other member is anonymous. Their two UNTITLED albums, Black Is and Rise , are all great alongside their Nine album, which is currently only available on physical media like vinyl. Their signature neo-soul/R&B sound works very well, but on Air , we’re getting something entirely different. What is it? Let’s get into Air and unravel the mystery. Let’s just get the cat out of the bag: this is just a classical album. No way to sugarcoat it, this is a modern classical album. I’ve never heard SAULT go in this direction at all, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. One of 2021’s best albums, Little Simz’s Sometimes I Might Be Introvert , which has gorgeous classical-style production, was...

Cache Saturday is a series of unranked reviews where I’m gonna catch up on albums I’ve listened to, whether it’s for the first time or not. I’ll also cover new albums I’ve missed from earlier or were cut from my schedule. Also, they’ll all be done in one paragraph. This week’s entry is the comeback (at the time) of one of the most beloved electronic and plunderphonics groups ever, The Avalanches, with their second album, Wildflower . For those that don’t know, plunderphonics is a subgenre of electronic music where songs are entirely composed of samples, and The Avalanches are masters of their craft. Their most recent album, We Will Always Love You (which celebrates its first anniversary today), actually earned the Cordavision brand’s first perfect score. If I’m being honest, The Avalanches has one of the best discographies of any band working right now. Wildflower is the feeling of that one summer you don’t want to end wrapped in one album. The beat on “Frankie Sinatra” with Danny Br...

I adore the abstract cover art of this. It’s like seeing a picture of the inside of a volcano, but when you zoom in, the quality goes down and it becomes fuzzy. Okay, okay. I know it’s two short EP reviews in a row, but I’ve been busy, alright? I’ve just really wanted to cover this. Iconic New Jersey producer Clams Casino recently dropped Winter Flower , a beat tape that certainly caught my attention because, well, it’s new Clams Casino. I like him. There was a pretty big part of this that caught me off guard of this project, and that was that this is very skeletal and each track is pretty short. It’s something new to hear from Clams, at least to me it is, and it’s pretty cool. One thing I’ve always appreciated about a good amount of his work, and especially on here, is that it truly does work on its own. Sure, you could probably put a rapper like Yung Lean over it and it could work, but it still works just as well as instrumentals. Overall, Winter Flower is something I’d never compla...

You know what? I might buy this on vinyl for the cover alone. Damon Albarn is a musician I’ve admired for a long time now. He ended up being a gateway to some of my favorite artists ever because of Gorillaz and I’ve always liked his work for Blur, but he hasn’t truly had much of a solo career. He’s released one solo album, 2014’s Everyday Robots, and he confirmed that he has another Gorillaz album planned for some time next year. In the meantime, he’s recorded The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows , announced back in 2019 as a tribute to Iceland. I’ve been excited for this for a while now, so let’s not waste time and get into it. Honestly, there was one album that came to mind when listening to it, and that’s David Bowie’s final album, Blackstar . This album has the oddball, jazzy tone that made Blackstar so beloved and I’m finally glad that there’s a similar album to that. I try not to use direct comparisons like that, but I feel that this was too big to ignore. The pro...

More like GOODGOODNOTBAD. Man, I’ve really been trying to get into modern jazz lately. An album I’ve been listening to a lot recently when it comes to 2021 jazz is Promises , the new album from Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders. It’s definitely growing into an all-time favorite for me in the genre, but there might be some competition now. I don’t know anything about BADBADNOTGOOD, but after singing the praises of Promises , I got recommended that I listen to this when it dropped. Let’s get into Talk Memory and see how it is. Throughout this album, I’ve really enjoyed how this quartet combines all of the different types of jazz and instrumental hip-hop. Where I think this album stands out the most is its production. I feel like it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. Self-production is something that’s always so impressive to me, and there are plenty of artists that don’t get enough credit for it. BADBADNOTGOOD entirely produced this album, like most of their own work, and it...

Alright, I’m reviewing the score of a movie that hasn’t even been released yet. This is my redemption arc. If this is successful, I’ll be in the upper echelon. I gotta admit, I’ve never heard of a concept like this. Legendary composer Hans Zimmer is known for his pretty great track record for his film scores. His work in film has been absolutely stunning, and this is a brand new experiment for him. Denis Villeneuve’s new film, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune , has been in the works for a while now, and it has a massive cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, David Dastmalchian, Chang Chen, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem all star in it. When I heard that Zimmer was going to compose the score, I was so excited. Along with that, word got out that Zimmer had made not one, not two, but three separate scores for the movie. The first ...

Might as well shoot my shot with this one: Al, you’re fucking awesome. If you’re reading this, my DMs are open. Hit me up, I missed out on the This Thing of Ours drop. It’s no question that The Alchemist is one of my favorite producers working right now. He’s worked on some of my favorite hip-hop projects in the past couple of years and has consistently put out solo instrumental work that may not get as much attention as his collaboration albums with Freddie Gibbs, Action Bronson, Boldy James, or his most recent one, Armand Hammer, but they deserve just as much attention. Unlike his This Thing of Ours EP from earlier this year, the sixth release in his Rapper’s Best Friend series, which is essentially a compilation of his favorite/best beats from the past couple years. This time around, these beats were rapped over by Westside Gunn, Conway the Machine, Freddie Gibbs, Roc Marciano, Mach-Hommy, Boldy James, Navy Blue, YOUNGQUEENZ, Tvoy, Eto, Nas, Benny the Butcher, India, Big Twins, A...

I fully understand that the album cover’s low quality for a reason, but it just works. Bronx rapper MIKE has been an artist that’s always stood out to me. His very laidback delivery with morbid and depressive lyrics can be matched with Earl Sweatshirt’s newest output, but while some people think MIKE is taking from Earl, it’s actually the other way around. His last album, weight of the world , was one of my favorite rap albums of 2020, and a year to the day, he’s back with his seventh album overall, Disco! . I really wasn’t expecting any major switch-ups in sound or lyrics, but we only have one feature on here and that comes in the form of Sideshow, who recently made a good contribution to The Alchemist’s latest EP, This Thing of Ours . Once again, it’s entirely produced by MIKE under the dj blackpower moniker, and that pretty much sums up my expectations. Is Disco! another record under MIKE’s belt? Let’s see. When it comes to the production, it’s a lot more abstract and his least acc...

Cool Bug Fact: This is the best cover art of the year so far. The Alchemist is back. Again. Earlier this year, he dropped a collaborative effort with Armand Hammer titled Haram, which ended up being my favorite Armand Hammer project and one of my favorite albums of the year so far. Now, he’s back with a new solo EP called This Thing of Ours . He’s never really disappointed with his recent EPs, Bread and Lunch Meat. This EP here follows the same structure as those last projects. It’s 8 tracks, the first half is the songs with vocals, the second half are the instrumentals of said songs. It’s got a good lineup of features from Earl Sweatshirt, Boldy James, Navy Blue, Maxo, Pink Siifu, and Sideshow. I’m pretty excited for this project, so let’s just get right into it. God, the beats on here are so good. Al really outdid himself yet again, and for a career so impressive and legendary, this is something else. They really match the gorgeous cover down below, which makes this album feel like a...

LET FLYLO DO THE BLADE  SCORE PLEASE. I support anything Flying Lotus is involved in. He’s one of my favorite producers of all time, he’s been involved in and has made some of my favorite albums of all time, and he’s really influenced my taste in music. First, let’s give a little context to this project right here. In 2018, Netflix announced that Studio MAPPA, a Japanese animation company behind popular anime like Yuri!!! on Ice , the final season of Attack on Titan , and the upcoming adaptation of popular manga Chainsaw Man , is creating a miniseries for the platform called Yasuke , a story about recorded history’s first black samurai serving under Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga. While there are slightly more fantastical elements in the miniseries, the core story is still there. LaKeith Stanfield voices Yasuke and executive produced the series along with Flying Lotus himself. Flying Lotus also did the score for this project, which is being considered his seventh studio album. Along...

An unborn child dropped before Frank Ocean. Let that sink in. If I hadn’t heard about this on Twitter, I would’ve never searched for this. This is gonna be a shorter review mainly because the concept of the album is much more interesting than the album itself. When this album was recorded, Luca Yupanqui wasn’t born yet. Her parents, Elizabeth Hart and Iván Diaz Mathé, had decided to make up a massive experiment. They recorded Luca’s in utero movements were translated to sound using biosonic MIDI technology. The result of five one-hour sessions is Sounds of the Unborn , an ambient album that is unlike anything I’ve heard. Is that a good thing or a bad thing, though? We’re about to find out. Dude, this baby is talented. Imagine what she can do once she’s fully grown. I’m just messing with you, but really, this is some harrowing stuff. Like, this is a DARK album. There are some legitimately disturbing sounds on here that I don’t ever wanna sit through again, but kind of in a good way? I a...

I’m writing this in the future, and I’m sending it back in time to myself to publish on Thursday. My past self hasn’t even heard the album yet. Wish him luck while he’s listening to it. This is a bit of a first for me. For the ones that don’t know, I’m currently majoring in film in college, and that covers all of the bases. So, I figured, while I’m at it, I might as well review my first film score. You’d think that I’d go for more of a classic soundtrack, maybe a more well-known composer, but Ludwig Göransson has made a very unconventional score for the film TENET . Christopher Nolan’s go-to composer, Hans Zimmer, was busy with scoring the new Dune film, so now, we have a pretty unorthodox film score here. Here are my thoughts! It’s worth noting that Ludwig Göransson has been on an insane run. After working with Childish Gambino on nearly every one of his albums, he’s been making film scores for quite a bit. He first gained recognition for his work on Ryan Coogler’s Rocky sequel, Cree...