The Rice Thresher

Taylor Swift has been on the pop scene for nearly a decade, making her a staple of radio music since elementary and middle school for me and many of my peers. Her new album, 1989, is named after her birth year. That makes Swift nearly seven years older than the average Rice University freshman. But I still think of her as the seemingly perennial teenager that burst on the scene in 2006 with songs about the overwhelming emotions associated with high -school romance. And her country-tinged, guitar-rock ballads are at least partially responsible for the introduction of country into mainstream-pop radio, although her detractors will call those tunes ‘country pop’ or just ‘pop.’

https://www.ricethresher.org/article/2014/11/album-review-taylor-swifts-1989-d

Music Review-SBTRKT, "Wonder Where We Land"

(10/01/14 9:26am)

In retrospect, it’s easy to label what each year sounded like in music. 1969 was psychedelic rock music; 1977 was disco; 1985 was new wave (and Bruce Springsteen); 1991 was grunge; 1999 was teen pop stars; 2012 was dubstep. It’s much more difficult to describe what the “sound of today” is. For one thing, each year brings more genre crossover than the year before it, from Taylor Swift featuring dubstep production to Avicii featuring a folk ballad. Additionally, as streaming and MP3 downloading become more and more popular, to the point where far more students listen to Spotify than the radio, popular taste becomes divergent as individuals develop keen, eclectic tastes. So that’s why listening to the excellent second album, Wonder Where We Land, by British electronic musician SBTRKT should both amaze and confound listeners; it’s composed of everything popular now but still carves out its space as an album unlike any other released this year.

https://www.ricethresher.org/article/2014/10/music-review-sbtrkt-wonder-where-we-land

Review: alt-J, "This is all Yours"

(09/24/14 9:49am)

The sophomore album from a young, successful band is often the most important to their career arc and for good reason: The sophomore slump is a very real thing. Countless upstart indie bands, from MGMT to The Strokes to The xx, have received some degree of critical backlash for their second LPs, typically because they either changed nothing about their formula or they changed it too much. This is the stage set for alt-J, the Leeds-based folk and electronic crossover band that came out of nowhere in 2012 to win the Mercury Prize, the award given to best British LP of the year, for their debut album An Awesome Wave.

https://www.ricethresher.org/article/2014/09/review-alt-j-this-is-all-yours