reviews

THOUGHTS ON SPRINGSTEEN’S LOST ALBUMS | 2025-06-26

The Boss is back in towns. Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band returned to the road earlier last month for their only as-of-yet scheduled shows this year, bringing what has been re-dubbed the grand Land of Hope & Dreams Tour to more than half a million fans in six countries throughout summer, after being forced to cut short their European leg due to illness last year. Beginning with a three-show run in mighty Manchester, UK, these re-scheduled dates serve as the culminating finale to the two-year-long run of what were Springsteen and co’s first live performances in almost seven years. And while an E Street Band roadtrip is always sure to turn a fair amount of industry heads, particularly when your ringleader is 75, this latest one managed to garner an extra notch of attention thanks to some inadvertent promo from none other than the sitting President of the United States.

During his tour opener, on 14th May, Springsteen let out a few less-than-flattering speeches about the current executive branch governing his home country. In response, US President Donald Trump posted an unhinged statement going at the Boss’s appearance and intelligence, while also demanding an investigation into former Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s endorsements that came from Springsteen himself, as well as a slew of other A-list celebrities. Not even a full week later, the New Jersey success story saw fit to release a whole brand new live EP—conveniently titled Land of Hope & Dreams—taped at that momentous Manchester tour opener. And yes, he included those ad libs. As the good people over at Apple Music put it: no shade to the four defiant songs captured during the gig, but this may well be the first live record surprise-dropped for its stage banter.

We might’ve buried the lead though. For the real kicker this #BruceSummer have got to be the seven previously-unheard studio full lengths dropping for the first time tomorrow, Friday 27th June. The widely-rumored, long-anticipated Tracks II: The Lost Albums—a spiritual successor to the 1998 cult four-disc Tracks collection that has become the ultimate non-studio album fan favorite over the years—is a gargantuan set spanning 83 songs (74 of which never-before-heard). Conspicuously filling in essential chapters of Springsteen’s expansive timeline, Tracks II arrives in limited-edition nine LP, seven CD, as well as all the obligatory digital formats—including custom packaging for each of the seven records-in-record, with a 100-page cloth-bound, hardcover book featuring rare archival photos, liner notes from essayist Erik Flannigan, and a personal introduction on the project from the Boss himself. A more digestible and chart-friendly companion bundle—Lost And Found: Selections from The Lost Albums—will instead feature twenty highlights from across the full tracklist, also out the same day on two LPs or one CD.

Upping the overall B-sides count by a generous 17 offerings, compared to the 66 off the first Tracks instalment, Tracks II maps a creative trajectory that includes writing sessions ranging from 1983 to 2018. For the project, Springsteen and longtime producer/multi-instrumentalist sideman Ron Aniello polished the sound quality and sparsely added instrumental enrichments here and there to the old tapes. The bulk of the material does stem from the Boss working as a one-man studio band, as he has since the 1980s. The umbrella front cover for the vault collection—linked at the end of this piece—lets us deduce that the top-to-bottom chronological order in which the seven projects are listed should refer to their gestation period over the projected 35-year range (i.e. with LA Garage Sessions ’83 being the oldest, and Perfect World the one compiled in 2018). As of the time of this writing, just mere hours away from the big reveal, Columbia Records and the Springsteen camp have been unleashing six standalone teasers from as many distinct discs within the coveted assemblage, with the inaugural LA Garage Sessions ’83 LP remaining the only one without advance listening (safe for an elusive low-fidelity 20-second teaser on the box set’s splash website).

Things kicked off early into April, along with the first project reveal, when a debut look at the series came in the form of “Rain in the River“, a blistering and expansive Perfect World cut that aptly encapsulates that project’s arena-ready E Street blend. Halfway through that same month, the synth-heavy and drum machine-programmed “Blind Spot” was served to quench the longstanding thirsts of all those salivating over Springsteen’s allegedly mythical ‘hip-hop influenced loops record’—ours included. As it turns out, that collection of ten numbers has now been billed as the Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, perhaps the most highly-anticipated of the seven LPs, if you ask us. Curiously enough, the previously available “Missing“—from The Crossing Guard OST—remains true to its title and does not in fact appear on the tracklist of what would’ve felt like its perfect home album.

Meanwhile, on the 1st May, the The Lost Albums roll out added another notch to its cowboy belt, by completely switching up the mood: “Faithless“, the titular song of the 11-track third disc in the catalog, is a reserved, husky, and unplugged country Western affair. Not the most immediate and ear-catching jam in the Springsteen lore—particularly considering his accomplished foray into the genre on 2019’s Western Stars—but one that rewards patience and repeated listens by way of a more focused TLC. This collection of songs was actually initially meant to soundtrack a ‘spiritual Western’ motion picture based on an unidentified book, started in 2005. Springsteen wrote and recorded the music all by himself in a matter of weeks, building on a foundation of spiritual piano and bluesy slide guitar—twenty years later, the film is reportedly still ‘in development’. Somewhere North of Nashville‘s “Repo Man“, released two weeks later on 14th May, pulls another 180° on the promotional roll out sonics, with its lively, saloon-y, and galloping blues-country flairs, couched in an infectious immediacy that is poised to make it a catchy live staple (tall order, we know!).

A couple weeks after that, Mexican ranchera-disc 5 Inyo‘s unplugged preview came through in the shape of “Adelita“, a soft and gentle ode to Mexico’s ‘soldaderas’—women who played a major role in the country’s fight for independence. Lastly, but not least of the advance pack, this past 12th June the Boss unwrapped the subdued piano-jazz brushed “Sunday Love“, a final teaser off the Western Stars-cutting room floor exhumed retro-pop affair Twilight Hours. The major 7th chords-record is a collection presenting a window into the ‘what-if’ the 2019 country folk outing were a double album instead, offering the New Jerseyan’s take on a softer, more jazzy revisitation of the storied American songbook. In a recent press release about the tune, Springsteen says, “I love Burt Bacharach, and I love those kinds of songs and those kinds of songwriters. I took a swing at it because the chordal structures and everything are much more complicated, which was fun for me to pull off. All this stuff could have come right off of those ’60s albums.” Sure, but it also still sounds a lot like Springsteen, and like a cut that wouldn’t have been too out of place on 2002’s The Rising.

In summation, over the course of almost three full months of promo we’ve been fed with six previously unreleased Bruce Springsteen rarities, amounting to about 23 minutes of new material. Tracks II is 83 songs long, and a quick inferential stunt on account of this initial sample suggests we could expect something in the region of 320 minutes (or more than five hours!) of runtime. That’s an inordinate amount of never-heard-before music to sift through, let alone for somebody with 21 studio albums already in the catalog. It’s a barrage of music that would put whole careers’s worth of tracks by average artists today to shame. All (re-)released on one day. We’re no doubt living in times of Springsteen abundance—and we have no complaints over that. Oh, and didn’t we mention last month’s live EP that was basically taped and released overnight?

In case you were wondering, we’re going to catch Bruce and his E Street Band live in a matter of days in Milan, Italy, as part of one of those rescheduled tour dates from last year. The chances of hearing a cut off Tracks II performed live when you have a cherished catalog of almost 400 to pull from are slimmer than your average American’s budget left at the end of the month, but hey we’ll keep you posted in case he does. As a consolation, we’ll have seven new studio LPs to savor wall-to-wall as early as tomorrow morning. Speaking of which, here’s how we’d rank them in order of anticipation and excitement, before hearing any more of the whole thing:

  1. Streets of Philadelphia Sessions
  2. LA Garage Sessions ’83
  3. Perfect World
  4. Twilight Hours
  5. Somewhere North of Nashville
  6. Faithless
  7. Inyo

No empirical rhyme or reason over this; just gauging the enjoyment the various teasers have been providing hitherto, and knowing Bruce Springsteen a little bit. Yet, clearly not enough to predict what happened next. In a recent video deep-dive into the genesis and design of Tracks II, the 75-year old New Jersey native came through with a cold-blooded twist right at the end: there exists a Tracks III collection. And it’s apparently already finished. He went on to explain that ‘[Tracks III] is basically what was left in the vault‘, including outtakes from as far back as his 1973 debut, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and as recent as last year: ‘so there was a lot of good music left. There are five full albums of music‘. It might just be true that all good things come in threes, after all.

Streets of Philadelphia Sessions

“Sometimes if you lock into one song you like then you follow that thread. I had this song ‘Blind Spot,’ and I followed that thread through the rest of the record.” — BS

Faithless

“Faithless was a piece of work I took (on commission) for a spiritual Western film that was preparing to be made around 2004. In Hollywood, I have found, you can disappear into “development” for long periods of time so I thought I would release these now and let you hear my results of this interesting project.” — BS

Somewhere North of Nashville

“I wrote all these country songs at the same time I wrote ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad.’ Those sessions completely overlap each other. I’m singing ‘Repo Man’ in the afternoon and ‘The Line’ at night. So the country record got made right along with ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad.’ Very similar to ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and ‘Nebraska’” — BS

Inyo

“‘Inyo’ was a record I wrote in California during long drives along the California aqueduct, up through Inyo County on my way to Yosemite or Death Valley. It’s one of my favorites.” — BS

Twilight Hours

“At one time, it was either a double record or they were part of the same record. But I separated the ‘Western Stars’ material out and what I had left is ‘Twilight Hours.'” — BS

Perfect World

“‘Perfect World’…is a record I pieced together from work I had held for this project…I wanted just a little fun, noise, and rock ‘n’ roll to finish the package.” — BS

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

REPENTANT SINNERS | 2025-05-31

[***spoiler-free***]

We went to see the movie Sinners in theaters. Twice. We’ll watch it again. We’ve also been listening to the Ryan Coogler and Ludwig Göransson-supervised Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, acting as the commercial companion to the incidental Original Motion Picture Score (fully written and arranged by the award-winning Swedish composer—it has gotten a fair amount of spins itself). For the uninitiated, the blockbuster opened in theaters on 18th April, and is a US Southern gothic supernatural horror joint by 39-year old Californian film director, producer, and screenwriter Ryan Coogler—of Black Panther and Creed fame. Starring Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, and Jack O’Connell, the movie is distributed by Warner Bros Pictures and at the time of this writing fares as the seventh highest-grossing film of 2025, having received widespread acclaim from audiences and critics alike.

The motion pictures narrates of identical twins Smoke and Stack Moore returning to Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932, after a multi-year stint working for Al Capone in Chicago. Leveraging illegitimate funds stolen from outlaws up in Illinois, they acquire a decaying sawmill from local racist landowner Hogwood, with the intention of converting it into a blues-infused juke joint for the local black community overnight. Their cousin, ‘preacherboy’ Sammie, a gifted and aspiring guitarist, joins them despite his pastor father Jedidiah’s warnings that messing with blues music means invoking the supernatural. The twins also go on to recruit blues pianist Delta Slim and singer Pearline to boost their line up—as well as Smoke’s estranged wife Annie as cook, local Chinese shopkeepers Grace and Bo Chow as suppliers, and longtime field worker Cornbread as door bouncer.

On account of this premise, the full movie takes place over a narrative arc of 24 hours, from dawn to sunrise, as it were. True to its loaded title, it leaves no character able to cast the proverbial first stone. Above all though, it recounts of the power of soulful, dangerous music, summoning ancient tales of Faustian bargains involving legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, as well as of grit, persistence, and defiance. In it, belief and damnation aren’t presented as a discrete dichotomy, but rather as a continuum into which different people can strive to insert themselves. Some of them will stick their landing more toward the hell-bent end of the spectrum, whereas others will manage to redeem themselves by doing good. Or at least, better. The film displays remarkable performance by a slew of extremely well cast actors, but its main protagonist is undoubtedly blues music.

Music not only low-key furnishes utilitarian plot elements that weave together a robust, catchy, and well-rounded narrative, but acts as a fourth-wall of sorts, upon which rests a whole Stranger Things-esque premise of good vs evil. Unlike the Netflix teen-horror sensation, in Sinners the upside down is journeyed through the conjuring of otherworldly blues music. Music with a message, with a heart, and with a purpose. Music that served as triage for a peoples faced with all systemic injustices and structural exploitations of this world. Thing is: when played by the right person, blues riffs and licks crack open the Venn diagram separating heaven from the abyss. More often than not, with unintended consequences that tally up in communal baggages carried on by generations.

That’s what so relatable about the screenplay and its execution. Absent the cinematic bells and whistles tied to folkloric allegories that envelop the aptly unraveled story, the movie tells of a time and a place that occurred not even a century ago. Memories of societal textures, political orders, and civic mechanisms are still vivid in a lot of people’s minds, especially those of African American descent. Sinners presents us with a window into a slice of society whose perspective was completely negated at the time, and in doing so offers us a restaurant menu from which we can cherrypick who and what we want to see ourselves in. This thing has black people, Asians, native Americans, and of course the white. In many ways, the juke joint launched by the Moore bros can act as a Petri dish for the many communities we live in. The storytelling device of setting it during the segregative Jim Crow-era US South renders it poignant and important, but the greed, selfishness, and self-righteousness of most characters is timeless.

The feeling of belonging and the fight for self-preservation run deep in the thick plot—yet incidentally, those are two of the main motors that power the engines of blues rock. Most music stemming from heart-on-sleeve honesty, truly. Case in point: when local pastor Jedidiah bestows the cautionary tale upon his preacherboy son about the dangers of ‘bringing evil home’ by playing blues on the cursed guitar, he appears to be doing so while well aware of the artistic might of the music style in question. Unwavering, Sammie politely listens to his father’s dire warning, but still proceeds to join Smoke and Stack in their entertainment venture. In Sinners, much like real life, everyone has their own self-centered agenda, and is ready to go quite at length to impose its devils unto others. Whether in a dignified way or not, that’s for Belzebuth to determine.

The movie is far from a survival of the fittest, winner-takes-it-all parable though. Compassion and humanity surface to the top for a sizable chunk of the characters, good or bad may they be. This dynamic renders them well aware of the misdeeds they are committing, albeit not quite while they are committing them. L’esprit d’escalier. Without giving anything away, after repeated screenings of this flick, the sensation is that the sincere power of community—brought together inside the juke joint by the Moore twins—enacts a vessel that helps demystifying the cynicism of everyday life, bringing patrons and owners alike to the realization that their lives are more than the sum of their daily decisions. Uncompromising and unapologetic with respect to staying true to their innate identities, various protagonists in the feature film do seem to want to do the right thing. When amongst peers, they become selfless and free; all of a sudden their thirst for petty revenge fades into the background.

In typical Göransson fashion, the commercial-leaning soundtrack LP he curated features as a diverse an array of acts as trap singer Don Toliver, blues mainstay RL Burnside’s grandson Cedric Burnside, English alt-pop giant James Blake, Alice in Chains-founder Jerry Cantrell, Chicago Blues godfather Buddy Guy, as well as disgraced R&B singer/songwriter Rod Wave—who penned the official lead single for the Various Artists compilation. Blues is by definition anti-snob music. Blues is lunch pail and shovel music. Reflectively, Sinners is for everyone. The incidental original score by the 40-year-old Swedish musician, composer, and record producer is gripping and asphyxiating, whether synched to the moving images or listened to in audio-only isolation. Yet it is none the less an evocative recall of the range and dexterity of the underlying blues music.

“All money come with blood, baby“, says Smoke to Annie at one point in the movie, as she questions him about the dubious provenance of the cash stash he brought back from Chicago. Seas of blood and violent deaths are certainly not in short supply in here—yet the most lethal weapon of them all might just turn out to be a six-string with the right chord progression.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

2025 IS REVIVAL SEASON | 2025-02-28

When it comes to spitting dexterity on the mic, one would be hard-pressed to name anyone with more natural lyrical prowess than Columbus, GA-native rapper Brandon ‘BEZ’ Evans (B Easy). One half of the recently minted experimental/electronic hip-hop duo Revival Season, jointly with beatmaker Jonah Swilley, the gifted wordsmith has been at the rap game for about a decade at this point. Sporting a five-project strong solo discography of his own—with 2023’s Trap Sabbath as the clear standout amongst it—the MC managed to turn industry heads in spades at the beginning of last year, as he and Swilley dropped the exceptional Golden Age of Self-Snitching.

Revival Season’s 14-track debut LP clocks in just shy of forty minutes of runtime, and it’s an all-killer no-filler exercise in alternative hip-hop, with several indebted nods to electronic, funk, and dub music. Handily one of the most exciting rap debuts in the first half of the 2020s decade, Golden Age of Self-Snitching introduced the erratic duo to the world by way of zany, catchy, and carefree rap cuts more akin to cypher-like streams of consciousness, than cohesive label concept tapes. Owing their creative footprint to Linkin Park, Kendrick Lamar, Fever 333, Black Thought, and Mach-Hommy all in equal measure, the record pierces through the listeners’ sonic membranes like the warm hug of an earwormy fire alarm sound.

The project was puzzle-pieced together entirely self-sufficiently, written both remotely and in person, and recorded in different makeshift locations—including a health centre and an ad-hoc setup in Swilley’s house. BEZ’s bars take your breath away, precisely because he is low-key delivering them breathless himself. Sample “Barry White” at number two on the tracklist, a joint that has the MC dish out one 16 after another like his literal life depended on it—not without subdued Kanye West hat tips (“penitentiary chances”, “Brandon”)—on top of what sounds like Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” iconic six-string lick. The grandiose and spacey “Message in a Bottle“, on the record’s same front-end, carries more unhinged Yeezy worship (peep the “ultralight beam” refrain), but mostly turns into what’s perhaps the most immediate and irresistible groove on the whole album.

By contrast, the feet-swinging and heavenly “Last Dance‘ at number five would stand the test of time as a Petri dish of how to finally get the exhilarating EDM/rap crossover right—in spite of all the many kitsch attempts out there. If you only source one tune off Self-Snitching, we implore you to make it this one. In a different vein, the following “Boomerang” brings all the funk to the fold, and then some. Whether intentional or not, BEZ’s delivery on the tune seems to harken back to an early BROCKHAMPTON-era Merlyn Wood flow. The defunct boy band’s influence is immeasurable and contains so many multitudes at this point, we wouldn’t be shocked to find out that some of its ethos might have bled into Jonah Swilley’s DAWs and record plates. In the same breath though, switch your ears and attention to “Propaganda“, and you’d be forgiven to think that you’re hearing Mach-Hommy spitball over a lost Bob Marley instrumental—all the while A$AP Rocky jabs loose ad-libs from the other side of the studio.

Yes, Revival Season is that left-field. Testing never seems to come at the expense of social consciousness or thematic poignancy, though. It’s evident that BEZ holds Philly’s finest The Roots’ Black Thought in the highest of regards, and nowhere is that inspiration more present than on the gorgeous penultimate track “Eyes Open“. Flat-out lead rap hit material. Speaking of which, Heavenly Recordings, the PIAS-distributed UK imprint earmarking Revival Season’s debut full length, must have struggled big time when combing through potential lead singles for this thing. As a matter of fact, none of those that ended up chosen as part of the official rollout in 2023 (“Chop“, “Everybody“, and “Pump“, featuring Shaheed Goodie on guest vocal duties), actually received any mention in this piece yet. Talk about an embarrassment of riches.

What I came up listening to turned out to be so pivotal. I was in Georgia during the time of Dungeon Family coming up, and that turned out to be a big shifting point in hip-hop. We heard a lot of this stuff before the world, the way of thinking, the way of dress, the movement, the sound, we were there for it… Prior to that the South was really gated out, and as time has progressed it’s become more of a dominant sound, where almost everything in the genre comes from that time period and the sound and the attitude that was built there. All that stuff was on the back of really strong principles, on the back of the home-cooked, country-fied, soulful background that was added into the hip-hop formula from the South.

So the spitter-in-chief, with respect to how the duo continues to forge its singular sound. Since dropping Golden Age of Self-Snitching in February of last year, the outfit has further kept pushing the envelope by teasing new music—presumably leading up to their next yet-to-be-announcet exploit. Last summer they released the deliciously addictive standalone single “Dim Sum“, and followed it up later in October with a collab joint co-signed by Japan-born, Los Angeles-based alternative rapper Shamon Cassette, titled “WHITE HOUSE BLACK“. Since then, the USA and the Western world have, well, changed materially for the worst in too many ways. Revival Season are hereby officially being summoned to return to the scene, continuing to strike while the iron (and the planet) is hot.

Yet, outside of a one-off show scheduled in Oregon this summer, little is known about the 2025 plans of self-ascribed “non-religious rap entity“. In times of slim pickings, we’d be remiss not to resort to the clue in the band’s own name. More than ever before, there is no time like the present to reanimate spirits, re-mobilize civic action, and reclaim human rights. If it’s true that the coming together of Brandon Evans and Jonah Swilley was a “a divine appointment … [f]oreseen by oracles and foretold by angels”, then such protracted Godsend intervention is of the utmost urgency. After all, it’s no secret that B Easy and his DJ were religiously moulded by Georgia׳s slew of Pentecostal churches—if Self-Snitching is the deliverance right out of the gate, we can’t imagine how good the New Testament is going to sound. 2025 has got to be Revival Season.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

THE NEW YORK KNICKS ROSTER SET TO SONGS ON PEARL JAM’S DARK MATTER | 2024-04-25

What if each member on the core 2023-2024 New York Knicks line-up entering the NBA Playoffs was a song on Pearl Jam’s latest full length Dark Matter? With box score stats and roster standings updated as of the second game of the First Round best-of seven series against the Philadelphia 76ers in the Eastern Conference (NYK up 2-0), that is exactly what is going to happen here. To get our ducks in a row, the Seattle grunge rock legends’s 12th studio effort was released earlier this month on Republic Records, and comes four years after their 2020 mixed bag Gigaton. All cuts on the project were produced by new-gen West Coast rock historian and Eddie Vedder-worshipper Andrew Watt, clocking in at just shy of 50 minutes on new fierce, ironclad, and robust material.

Before we delve into the sequencing—a quick monition on the draft method used to select the New York Knicks players. We’d be remiss if we didn’t start by acknowledging the perhaps painful omission of 25-year-old center Jericho Sims (#45) from the tracklist. In our operationalization’s defense, the album has only got eleven tracks, so a cursory season playtime extraction coupled with a lower musical match make him the proverbial twelfth man cut from this rock band team. For similar, yet less controversial reasons, further Knicks bench players on the official roster list this season, such as Jacob Toppin (#00), Duane Washington Jr (#1), Charlie Brown Jr (#4), Daquan Jeffries (#8), Shake Milton (#13), Mamadi Diakite (#21), are also excluded from being considered for this shortlist.

1. Scared of Fear — Bojan Bogdanović (#44) | Credit his naturally alarmed glance, or conversely, the gregarious approach he must’ve adopted to break through in the world’s top basketball league hailing from God-forsaken Croatia, but the 35-year-old small forward veteran feels like the best place to start with the PJ record. Slowly coming into this own after the February trade from the Detroit Pistons, he has so far undoubtedly been the more impactful of the two partners at the Law Firm of Burks & Bogdanović. The track’s full-throttle percussions and piercing guitars act as a fitting metaphor for his full-court hustle and shooting prowess, while the sonic plateau culled in the song’s bridge stands to represent the ebbs and flows experienced with the Knicks jersey hitherto. Still, the robust runtime at four minutes and a half nonetheless denotes Bogey’s stoic and earnest style of play on the floor.

2. React, Respond — Miles ‘Deuce’ McBride (#2) | “Don’t let the sky hook beat you to submission / Maybe it’s the price of price of our admission / Ain’t no fucking roses to our condition / Turn this anger into nuclear fission, yeah, baby, baby“. What better set of lyrics to describe the improbable ascent of what is now officially the floor general of the Knicks’s second unit? After a somewhat underwhelming first half of the season—bottlenecked by a wealth of players trumping him in coach Tom Thibodeau’s formation rankings—something unlocked in earnest around the NBA All-Star break for the former West Virginia Mountaineers youngster. McBride is arguably a top three ball handler on the team, and as a nod to the opening song stanza, has never let his smaller size be a limiting factor in his NBA hooping shenanigans. He was ready to seize his chance, and that has led him to become the second pure playmaking guard choice in the line-up—right after none other than breakout team star Jalen Brunson.

3. Wreckage — OG Anunoby (#8) | Befitting his first name shortening acronym, this Englishman in New York plays with the grace, poise, and wisdom of a multi-decade seasoned statesman, belying his mid-twenties age registry. A star trade in the winter transfer market season across the whole league, the Knickerbockers hold a stupidly impactful 20-3 winning record when Anunoby is on the floor (Playoff games included). A wreckage was both the athletic juncture he joined the Manhattan team in—with key starting players Robinson and Randle reported out for the rest of the season at the time—and the clinical picture of his right elbow during that fearful February-March stint, where he himself had to be sidelined, met by most Knicks fan’s exorcisms. The levity, emotion, and lightness with which he plays mirror the track’s sunny and carefree spirit, while the wholesome flair on the lyrical front as well as a soaring and catchy refrain recalling his vastly underrated jams at the rim.

4. Dark Matter — Julius Randle (#30) | For all intents and purposes, the greatest and most popular player on the team. The titular album track is not only its lead single, but its defining and equalizing driving force too. Congruently to its musical twin, Randle is the only element on the list that truly transcends the current team’s zeitgeist, as a three-time NBA All-Star and a two-time All-NBA player—on top being the NBA’s Most Improved Player Award in 2021. Now, scientific method sticklers might be quick to point out how his being out since the end of January due to his right shoulder dislocation should make him ineligible for this tracklist. Yet let us be serious, no Knicks roster list to speak of can afford to neglect its marquee player—especially during a statement season averaging 24 points a game, a whooping five more than his career average of 19. It’s plain and simple: the cut slaps, goes hard, and defines Dark Matter, so does (a healthy) Julius Randle.

5. Won’t Tell — Mitchell Robinson (#23) | The comic relief. Track number five on the album is the most uplifting, its most solar and joyous. Then again, do not get it twisted, Pearl Jam is stuffed with negative space and melancholy, even in its brighter moments. The song’s chorus motif chanting “You can find me here / Waiting for your message to come” seems like an indirect homage to Mitchell’s sweet spot stomping ground under the rim, while his unofficial role as the team’s prankster and meme master lends even more credence to him matching the record’s lightheartedness. We can’t skip the part where we acknowledge the cosmic balance found in this being Dark Matter‘s fifth track, and the traditional center role on a basketball court being labeled as ‘the five’. If you don’t read any more track-to-player pairings past this point, let this be proof this parallelism is worth humoring.

6. Upper Hand — Isaiah Hartenstein (#55) |The team’s tireless workhorse, he who played all 82 regular season games last year—reflected by an ambitious, expansive, and triumphant 6-minute opus. Heralded as way more than a luxury reserve for starting center Mitchell Robinson, Hartenstein kept the Knicks afloat during that critical February-March period, where they didn’t seem able to catch a break in their own town—alas, only to capitulate himself for a brief period under his own Achilles trials and tribulations. Much like the tune, Isaiah can be a smidge inconsistent at times, yet he never falters in blood, sweat, and tears, and most times he does manage to prevail and come out on top. As his signature defensive move, turn to this recent savage in-motion block of Tyrese Maxey’s surefire layup, denying the 76ers a certified win with only seconds left on the game clock during game 2 of the ongoing Playoff series.

7. Waiting for Stevie — Alec Burks (#18) | This one is rough. The second Knicks coming of 32-year-old shooting guard Alec Burks this winter was not supposed to turn out this way. After a somewhat average start in January and February—with sizable minutes as part of coach Thib’s end of 1st and end of 3rd quarter second unit rotation—the AWOL partner of the Law Firm of Burks & Bogdanović gradually faded into the team’s anonymous background, with a measly 30 minutes of combined playtime on the floor during the last ten Knicks games to date, and an even more dreadful 5 total points scored during the same timespan, for bad measure. Swap the “Stevie” for “Alec” on the similarly underwhelming, contrived, and rough around the edges album track’s title, and that tells you everything you need to know here. Mediocrity-fest.

8. Running — Josh Hart (#3) | A clear case for when a one-word song name fits a player like a glove. Josh Hart has low-key been the true blue-collar revelation of this New York Knicks season. The definition of an industrious all-around role player, this guy’s regularly playing 40+ minutes each game, and not batting an eye. Eddie Vedder’s opening verse on the cut, “Got me running, got me running, but the race, it never ends / Got me running, or else I’m done in / You got me coming as you’re going and the chase, it never ends / I’ll be running ’til the second coming” legit sounds like it was written about the versatile 29-year-old Maryland native. Hands down the best rebounding guard of the whole NBA, and its most ruthless birdwatchers’s murderer, Josh Hart epitomizes all the little actions and plays that don’t quite end up in the box score, but that make teams win games, and (hopefully) leagues. The track is a two-minute incendiary blister that cuts throats and claws listeners by their ears, not without splashing specks of melody and introspection. The h(e)art and soul of the project.

9. Something Special — Precious Achiuwa (#5) | The quintessential providential player. Nigerian-American Precious Achiuwa was there when no one else was. A ductile player and homegrown New Yorker—via Miami and Toronto—he is able to seamlessly play each of the five positions on the floor. In those few and far-in between games where Robinson, Randle, Anunoby, and Hartenstein were all down, he rose from the ashes and stood up for the city, carrying the whole quintet’s presence under the basket on his shoulders. Arguably the most underrated overachiever on this Knicks version, it was his outstanding locked-in performance during those cold winter months that made it possible for fans to quickly forgive and forget RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley for jumping ship during the trade window—not exactly the easiest kicks to fill. As better and stronger songs come back to relevance on the tracklist, Achiuwa finds himself retreating to warming up the bench a bit more—albeit never forgotten. Not the most skilled, talented, or dexterous player on the list, but boy is he something special.

10. Got to Give — Donte DiVincenzo (#0) | The Knicks sniper with a diesel engine. Big Ragu went from borderline disappointing summer trade wannabe-highlight to fixture shooting guard starter on the 2nd seed team of the Easter Conference in around six months. Whilst at that, he saw fit to set the all-time franchise record for three-pointers in a single regular season with 283 (joining Stephen Curry, James Harden, Klay Thompson, Paul George, Buddy Hield and Luka Doncic as the only players to make 280+ in a season). Coinciding with the tune’s crescendo build, DiVo successfully learned how to make himself indispensable, much like this back-end album highlight. Catchy, agreeable, and so damn trademark Knicks; together with the aforementioned Hart and Jalen Brunson he represents that Villanova Wildcats college basketball core that is daring the Mecca of Basketball to dream big this year. “I’ll be the last one standing / I’ll be the first to forgive, yeah“—if one is to trust Pearl Jam, the sniper’s aim is sharper than ever.

11. Setting Sun — Jalen Brunson (#11) | Last, but not least. Song number eleven for #11. Yes, Randle might be the New York Knicks poster child, but Brunson is their prodigal son. The indisputable leader and top scorer on this team, thanks to his formidable performances and sensational contributions to the Knicks once-in-a-generation season record, Jalen was named an All-Star Player this past February. Like his sonic counterpart, he is beautiful to watch, universally impactful, and the undeniably constituent part of the whole. The guy is averaging 29 points and 7 assists per game this season, for God’s sake. We couldn’t imagine Dark Matter without this wall-to-wall acoustic enchantment coda, and so can’t we the New York Knicks without his 27-year-old point guard. Without being a prisoner of the moment, Jalen Brunson is poetry in motion. Jalen Brunson was born to play basketball.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time. And good luck to the Knicks in the Playoffs this time around.

AV

GARY CLARK JR HAS UPLOADED | 2024-01-26

The command completed successfully. More than five years to the day after the release of his 2019 Grammy Award-winning exploit This Land, 49-year-old Austinite Gary Clark Jr has finally uploaded the first teaser pack of new music from his upcoming fourth studio effort, JPEG RAW. Dubbed a nifty and portable sampler, the bundle couches four brand new cuts, all featured on the full album sequence of the blues rocker’s highly-anticipated 12-track project. Fully unfolded as an acronym into Jealousy, Pride, Envy, Greed Rules Alter-Ego, Worlds, JPEG RAW is slated for a street date at the end of March, and continues to fulfill a multi-album obligation with major label Warner Records.

Generously previewed across almost twenty minutes of material laced into four songs at once,—”Maktub“, the title track, “This Is Who We Are“, and “Hyperwave“—the LP is set to also feature samples of Thelonious Monk and Sonny Boy Williamson music, and sports noteworthy co-signs from royalty such as Stevie Wonder and George Clinton. If the sampler is anything to go by, JPEG RAW is poised to both build and expand on the already vast range of sounds and influences championed by the prodigal guitarist on previous outputs. Take the rusty and smokey guitar lick on album opener “Maktub”, which is as immediate and sticky a riff as it gets. While the rest of the same track might get filed as a somewhat canonical Clark Jr effort through and through, one need only press play on “Hyperwave” at number nine on the tracklist to wander into pop-adjacent psychedelia that heavily flirts with a current day singer-songwriter canon.

Elsewhere, the eponymous cut at number two on the record slows things down a smidge, by smoothening some of the opener’s razor edge—yet not without seizing the opportunity to undercut the tune with exuberant tongue-in-cheekness covert as alarm-sounding for talking turkey. One shouldn’t let the apparently harmless lounge-backtrack vibe get it twisted, for the bluesman wastes little time to take no prisoners while preaching his views: “My daughters ain’t gotta shake hips to make tips / No judgement if it makes sense, it made sense / But I ain’t with the ratchet / Only racket they’ll be havin’ is if they pick up a good habit where“. Locked and loaded in the trials and tribulations of fame plus all its dues, Clark Jr attempts to combat inner demons with a healthy dose of self-reflection (“I shoulda paid more attention / All my fault, I did it all for the pictures“), before asking his interlocutor the only question that can redeem him: “If this is what you want, what you waitin’ for? / If this ain’t what you want, what you want?“.

Meanwhile, “This Is Who We Are” is a five minutes and a half epic. Coasting through seas of expansive sonic magnitude before diving headfirst into a pronounced R&B flair, the number is less a responsive answer than a proactively assertive statement. The joint also features angelic BV touches from London-based singer/songwriter and producer Naala, and might double as a central cornerstone of the whole listening experience once the full record becomes available (apparently it’s the first thing Clark Jr wrote for the album). With its lopsided marriage of orchestral elements with dense and viscous tapestry of edgy blues guitar weaves—paired with pierce-loud drumming in the mix—this might not necessarily be the song we deserve, but it’s definitely the song we need.

And then there’s “Hyperwave”. Handily the biggest show-stopping teaser as part of this initial collection of singles. Calling this type of jam unexpected from the Blak & Blu creator would be an understatement. Packing a soft and tender melody into an intelligent psych-rock wireframe, this is the type of material one would peg a post-indie band from the UK with making—yet the Austin six-string prodigy pulls it off in both a tasteful and extremely gratifying fashion. With its bona fide ear worm refrain, the track doesn’t sacrifice soulful transudation at the expense of memorability and accessibility; not the smallest of feats. In a lengthy interview with Forbes, the Warner recording artist revealed the writing sessions that led to JPEG RAW to be loose, pandemic-constrained, and unentangled; admitting how he and his band simply “got together in my studio every Thursday and […] smoke a brisket and […] just sit there and eat barbecue, have a few drinks and play music“.

The haphazard impetus behind the sonic Rorschach inkblot test that became the twelve cuts on the album can certainly be noticed on this sampler. Moreover, hearing how Andre 3000’s recent foray as a flautist into new age jazz inspired him to follow his raw unedited instinct in the same interview draws every door open to a prescient full-blown range and experimentation on the record. Adding that to a more clued in hint where he recalls specific cross-pollinated genre contaminations (“I want my drums to sound like Willie Big Eye Smith meets Jay Dilla. I want my bass to be James Jamerson and Mike Dean“) has us at the edge of our seats to find out what the full project will hold. For Gary Clark Jr is the kind of important artist people will happily wait a long time for. His music and lyrics manage to capture vivid vignettes of fractured modern America, and translate them into universal language and feelings that transcend border and state lines—all the while cruising as one of the biggest rock flagbearers in the mainstream. It’s time he tells us all how we’re really feeling, again.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV