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Modest Mouse was formed in Issaquah, Washington, in the year 1992. Issaquah was formerly a sleepy community removed from the sprawl of the Seattle metropolitan area, but is now another far-flung bedroom town swallowed whole by the Microsoft and later Amazon-centered tech boom and its ensuing concreting of the Puget Sound (more…)
France Gall
2,278 words
There once existed a time, alien to my young brain, in which people primarily discovered and listened to pop music on radio stations. These were entities subject to important forces, like censorship and record label interests, that gave rise to various standardizations and trade practices that persist to this day. During the age of the radio, the forces of globalization (more…)
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Kid A belongs on an end-times list of anti-modern records. How is that possible? Radiohead is, by any measure, one of the most successful recording groups in the world and also one of the most reliable when it comes to mainstreaming alternative and experimental music. Does it make sense to call a record like this one (more…)
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Sabaton is a Swedish metal band hailing from Falun. Their musical style, in the loose sense of the word, is mostly unremarkable power metal combined with a typically European harte vocal inflection courtesy of the group’s part-Czech lead singer, Joakim Brodén. Sabaton’s shtick, for lack of a more fitting term, is their use of “history” (more…)
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In memory of Gabi Delgado-López (April 18, 1958 — March 22, 2020).
Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, more concisely known as DAF, is a German electronic music band from Wuppertal consisting of Gabi Delgado-López and Robert Görl. Their name contains a light touch of irony, rendered into English as “German-American Friendship.” (more…)
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Rome is the project of Luxembourgish multi-instrumentalist Jerome Reuter. Genre-wise, one could call Rome “neofolk,” if one assumes that “neofolk” as a genre simply describes reedy guitars and deliberately vague attempts at mysticism. That describes the music of Rome to a T, a project that attempts to synthesize the often-complicated (more…)
1,221 words
Ernest Greene, the solo multi-instrumentalist behind Washed Out, was born in the state of Georgia. This extended play, Life of Leisure, is a drowsy chillwave mark that has impacted spheres far beyond its initial scope, most notably for the use of its “Feel It All Around” as the main theme for the television show Portlandia. (more…)
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Believe it or not, there was once a time in the now-enviable 2000s in which Midwestern indie bands were considered the epitome of cool. If you wore plaid shirts (sometimes, with a t-shirt over said shirt), could play passable guitar, and had a just-so-slightly off-kilter voice with which you could sing about outsiderdom and ennui, (more…)
1,222 words
Steely Dan is a band composed of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Their biggest hits have a kind of eternal life, anthems that grace barbecues, bars, and band jams for their simultaneously irreverent, yet wholesome outlook on American culture. This is perhaps best expressed in the group’s own name (more…)
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Venetian Snares is the working name of Canadian music producer Aaron Funk. Funk is best known for producing in the style known as breakcore, which comprises the bulk of this record. “Breakcore” is a semi-recent style developed when new possibilities afforded by sequencing and music production technology allowed artists (more…)
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Author’s note: Tomorrow marks one year of my writing for Counter-Currents.
Folklore is Taylor Swift’s eighth studio album. It joined the hallowed halls of other so-called “isolation records” on July 24, 2020, in a surprise release (more…)
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So, there are blacks with beats, heebs with chutzpah, and Swedes with serenity. What is a white dissident to do in an environment in which the talents of his people are so easily turned into springboards for cultural developments that annoy at best and brainwash at worst? (more…)
Icona Pop performs at Summerburst Festival, Gothenburg.
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White people are the undisputed masters of making catchy music. American and European pop songs make their way onto the airwaves of the entire world through a robust mechanism of economic globalization and sheer memetic power. But why is the music we make so catchy to just about all ears? And who doesn’t find our music appealing? It would be easy to chalk it up to the undeniable creative strength of our people, but like all endeavors in the arts in the modern world, songwriting has taken on the forms of science and cynical commercialism. (more…)
Jay-Z and Rick Rubin.
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Who is Rick Rubin?
If you asked in the early part of his career, he was a member of the provocative hardcore punk band, The Pricks. He would also stress that he was a nobody. Rubin’s purpose for being in the Pricks was, functionally, to piss off his rich Jewish father; (more…)
1,365 words
As the country gets more diverse, the radio gets more homogeneous. I don’t mean this in the ethnic sense, of course; America’s rockstars are more colorful than ever! Instead, the songs that dominate the country’s charts are beginning to sound more and more alike. The average pop station tends to be an indistinct mass of the same noises (more…)
1,444 words
The Peoples Temple, the utopian death cult best known for the Jonestown Massacre, recorded a gospel album under the name of the People’s Temple Choir in 1973. Far from an amateurish production, the album He’s Able features slick studio trickery and a surprisingly talented backing band for the choir to swing cuts of pop songs, (more…)
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Crystal Castles is a Canadian band, initially consisting of singer Alice Glass and producer Ethan Kath. The two met each other because of their mutual connections in the large and prolific Toronto music scene, and collaborated on one track, the chaotic “Alice Practice,” as a mere experiment. The two never intended to form a full-time group (more…)
1,920 words
Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot is a famed French actress, singer, pop culture icon, and accidental provocateur. Bardot’s marks on pop culture include her popularization of the bikini, the eponymous Bardot neckline, and her collection of absurdly fun and often intriguing slices of French pop music that feel both timeless in their replay value yet (more…)
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The world lost a truly insightful, thought-provoking, and daring artist on May 31st of this year. Mr. David Dees “illustrated” whole tons of Photoshop-core images depicting the ill deeds of the global elite as he saw it; a group that varyingly consisted of Zionist-occupied governments, vaccine manufacturers, lightbulb designers, (more…)
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If there ever was a time that whites and blacks have aired their grievances, then the past two weeks have been it. Cities are burning. People are being killed. “Justice,” as defined by one person or another, is being demanded. In so many ways, the true nature of blacks in the United States is being put on display for all to see. In fact, many blacks are expecting us to thank them for their mere presence. (more…)
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On this day in 1977, a band from Salford, England called Warsaw took to the stage for the very first time in their career. They were supporting the Buzzcocks at the Electric Circus concert in Manchester.
“Warsaw” was the name chosen by a group of young men, namely Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Terry Mason, and Peter Hook, (more…)
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Florian Schneider, one of two founding members of Kraftwerk and its primary creative director for most of the band’s existence, passed away on April 21, 2020. Schneider was responsible for some of music’s most fascinating, technically impressive, and culturally significant developments being brought to broader audiences. (more…)
1,496 words
Trahndorff-by-way-of-Wagner’s concept, Gesamtkunstwerk, refers to a work of art that incorporates all of art’s mediums in its final incarnation. The word in German literally means “altogether artwork.” Wagner’s later operas are often cited as approaching the realization of this ideal, and modern cinema is often evaluated upon this concept or used as a barometer for it. (more…)
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My father planted wisterias on the patio of our family’s home when I was nine years old. They refused to grow for a long time — in fact, their insistence on remaining low, depressing vines, drooping ever-downward to the grass, seemed like a personal insult to the handiwork of Mom and Dad. (more…)
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Crisis was an English punk-rock band formed in 1977 in Surrey. Their initial lineup consisted of Insect Robin the Cleaner, Phrazer, and the most famous two who didn’t have absurd nicknames: Douglas Pearce and Tony Wakeford. Crisis was explicitly a Leftist band, appearing at various Rock Against Racism concerts and collaborating with artists and organizers from the Anti-Nazi League. (more…)
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Changes can be considered the very first example of a neofolk band. Formed in 1969 by cousins Robert N. Taylor and Nicholas Tesluk, Changes has its roots in the earliest days of the folk revival and hippie scenes in the United States. (more…)
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Essence! is the most recent batch of material from Douglas Pearce’s Death in June, released on November 30, 2018. Essence! pulls from the earlier output of 90s Death in June, including its eclectic sampling work, noisy elements, and tastefully perverse whip-cracks for its compositions. Pearce brings the Death in June sound into the modern age, however (more…)
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Rumours was recorded by putting five musicians who hated each other inside of the same room for two months. The results were immaculate.
This seems to be contrary to logic, however. Wouldn’t forcing several creative types — people infamous for their egos — who have major beef with each other to work on the same project end in disaster? (more…)
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Sol Invictus, fronted by Tony Wakeford, is one of the “neofolk” scene’s best-known groups, alongside Death in June and Current 93. Sol Invictus emerged following Wakeford’s departure from Death in June — and later departure from controversial Above the Ruins — with a sound that progressively became lighter and more classically-inspired than most of what can be considered “neofolk.” (more…)
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Current 93 is a neofolk group fronted by David Tibet. Its name is derived from Aleister Crowley’s numerological manipulation of the words Thelema and agape, the “93 Current” of the present age.
If that’s not weird enough for you, it gets better! (more…)