Musiccosmos

In the new movie Juliet, Naked , a romantic comedy adapted from a Nick Hornby novel, Ethan Hawke plays Tucker Crowe, a reclusive and unheralded songwriter who suddenly returns to the world. Rose Byrne is the woman he falls in love with, and Chris O’Dowd is her Tucker Crowe-obsessed ex. It’s supposed to be pretty good! And one of the good things about it is the music. Tucker Crowe has to have songs, of course, and the Juliet, Naked soundtrack features Ethan Hawke singing original songs written by people like Ryan Adams, Conor Oberst, M. Ward, and Robyn Hitchcock — all smart choices for the character that Hawke plays. We’ve already posted Hawke’s version of Oberst’s song “LAX,” as well as Oberst’s haunted voice-and-piano demo for the song. And now the whole soundtrack, featuring both the artists’ demos and Hawke’s versions of those songs, is out. So that means we get new songs from Adams and Ward and Hitchcock, and we also get to hear one of his generation’s greatest actors singing...

With her fifth album, Mitski has solidified herself as one of the most advanced American songwriters. Or, at least that’s how Iggy Pop would put it . But the superlative bears out: Be The Cowboy is an album of vignettes, largely eschewing traditional song structure in favor of intense, precise portraiture. The songs on Be The Cowboy are more like paintings — hear one at a different angle and the entire meaning might change. The album is a sampling of sounds from Mitski’s past releases, from the studied theatricality of her earliest releases through to the omnivorous mash-ups present on 2016’s Puberty 2 . Be The Cowboy is at turns hopeful, sad, and endlessly ambitious, both economical and completely gutting. It’s our reigning Album Of The Week . Mitski shared three singles ahead of its release, “ Geyser ,” “ Nobody ,” and “ Two Slow Dancers . Now, you can listen to the whole thing below. Be The Cowboy is out now via Dead Oceans . قالب وردپرس The post Mitski Shares New Albu...

Some musicians use cryptic social media posts or pop-up shops to hype up a new project. Others favor giant gold heads . Some opt for no buildup at all, dropping albums out of nowhere á la Beyoncé. Young Thug chose snakes . Earlier this month, the Atlanta rapper and self-proclaimed drip god sent out several serpentine surprises to various media outlets in promotion of his new project, Slime Language . Although our own Scott Lapatine was out of the office when Thugger’s people attempted to drop off dear sweet Wave God , one skinny little green pal named Digits was successfully delivered to our friends and office-mates at SPIN , and he or she was cute as hell. The reptiles have been moved to locations better suited to their needs, and at last the new project they were promoting is finally here. Slime Language comes as part of the ongoing snake-centric “slime” series, including several volumes of Slime Season and last year’s joint release with Future entitled Super Slimey . The rel...

Over the past couple of months, the St. Louis quartet Foxing have been getting ready to unveil their intensely ambitious new album Nearer My God . From the first preview via “ Slapstick ,” it was clear that this outing would be something different from the once-nominally-emo group. From there, that only became more obvious, whether through the surging anthem of a title track or the danceable indie-funk of “ Gameshark .” Foxing teamed up with former Death Cab For Cutie member turned producer Chris Walla for Nearer My God , and together they crafted an album that’s hard to pigeonhole in any one place. There are traces of emo, sure, but there are also melodies that strive for U2-sized transcendence and weird rhythmic puzzle-grooves adorned with more disconcerting elements in the way that TV On The Radio prefers to dance through the apocalypse. You could go crazy with concocted hyphenated genres describing this thing, but the quickest route is to regard it as a rock album unconcerned w...

Tirzah first came onto the scene about five years back, with a run of truly immaculate dance tracks that were collected mostly on two EPs, 2013’s I’m Not Dancing and 2014’s No Romance . Since the jump, her songwriting project has been a collaboration with childhood friend and composer Mica Levi aka Micachu — they met at a school geared towards young musicians — and that creative partnership continues to thrive on Devotion , her full-length debut. One of Tirzah’s earliest and best songs suggests that there’s no romance without pain, and Devotion is largely an album about finding love in spite of those obstacles. It’s languidly self-aware and mature. There’s some straight-up love songs, like the gorgeous lead single “ Gladly ,” which is hymnal in its reverence: “All I want is you/ I love you/ Gladly, gladly, gladly.” And then there are songs which are more mired in self-doubt and insecurity, like “Guilty”: “Did I let you feel the blame when I should have been faithful?” she asks o...