Cordavision Music Reviews

God, the cover’s so dark. I love it. There’s a first time for everything and this marks the first for something. This will be the first live album I cover on the site, and I’m quite excited that this is the one. The Gothenburg-born musician Anna von Hausswolff has been an artist that’s been climbing onto my radar more and more as I dive into the neoclassical darkwave genre. Hausswolff’s fantastic Dead Magic is one of the first I’ve heard in the genre and the follow-up All Thoughts Fly is just as great. Now, her latest release is a 2018 live performance that has been hyped up a lot for the past few years. It’s finally available to the public, so let’s get into Live at Montreux Jazz Festival . You know, I’m one of the people that enjoy a live version of a song, but I do prefer studio versions of tracks more often. This album, though? I think these songs are the definitive recordings of each one. There’s really nothing bad about this. Hausswolff’s vocals are incredible, the instruments ...

I cannot express enough how terrifying this woman is to me. For those that don’t know, that is a positive. Kristin Hayter, known professionally as Lingua Ignota, is someone I’ve had trouble explaining why she’s one of my favorite artists. It’s not every day that your parents ask you what you’re listening to and you answer with “DO YOU DOUBT ME TRAITOR” or All Bitches Die , the name of her breakout album. Hell, I actually credit her for why I decided I wanted to write about music like this. Her last album, the mind-blowing and all-too-real CALIGULA , is a devastating look into abuse and misogyny. In her own words, she stated that CALIGULA takes the listener “through a cycle of abuse," along with looking at "abusive power, madness, depravity, narcissism” that are prevalent in politics and communities alike. I could write a college paper on how visceral CALIGULA is just from Hayter’s lyrics alone, but now, we look to the future. Her newest release, Sinner Get Ready , is here an...

Wow, the second film score I reviewed. Pretty awesome. Should this review come with a disclaimer? I actually haven’t seen Zack Snyder’s Justice League yet. I’ve seen some viral clips of it and I definitely plan on seeing it in the future. I’ve enjoyed a good amount of Tom Holkenborg’s score work, and if you don’t recognize his real name, just look up Junkie XL and see his work. I personally think his work on Batman v. Superman with Hans Zimmer is some of the most underappreciated pieces of music in the past five years. Now, after the fabled Snyder Cut debuted on HBO Max last week, Holkenborg released his score for the cut, which was entirely reworked from the original version. Let’s get into this behemoth. Is it odd to classify this as ‘neoclassical darkwave?’ The music nerd in me kinda jumped out because I was listening to Lingua Ignota while writing this, and I found some similarities when it comes to the sonic tone of this. Some elements from Snyder’s previous DCEU films are here, l...