F

Flavorwire

Sunn 0)))

Music

10 Albums Guaranteed to Make Your Ears Hurt

By Tom Hawking on

We’ve been listening a lot to the new Crystal Castles album III, which is out this week, here at Flavorpill, and while we’ve been enjoying it a lot more than we thought we would, we do rather miss the days when they sounded like someone taking a sledgehammer to a Commodore 64. Clearly, you have to be in the mood for such things, but when you are in the mood, there’s nothing more viscerally thrilling than some nasty, nasty noise music. We thought we’d share some of our favorite albums for inducing earaches. What are yours? (Incidentally, we mean albums that make your ears hurt in a good way — which means: sorry, Hadouken!/Enter Shikari/BrokenCYDE/etc, you don’t qualify.) … Read More

Music

10 Albums Recorded in Fascinatingly Exotic Locations

By Tom Hawking on

Piramida, the new album by Danish five-piece Efterklang, is out this week. The album continues Efterklang’s march away from the experimental weirdness of their early recordings toward a more conventional sound, and it’s also a pretty somber-sounding piece of work — perhaps because it’s based on field recordings that the band took in a crazy-looking abandoned mining town in the Arctic Circle. Indeed, the backstory to Piramida is pretty fascinating, and it got us thinking about albums that were recorded in similarly exotic locales. We’ve put together a selection, and as ever, we’re open to suggestions. (Just please for the love of god don’t mention Bon Iver and his damn cabin.) … Read More

Music

10 Contemporary Metal Bands You Should Know

By Tom Hawking on

Metal. It’s one of music’s most maligned and misunderstood genres, a culture that exists perpetually outside the mainstream and for the most part is perfectly happy doing so. Back when we were growing up in the ’80s, metal meant big hair, devil horns, and intimidatingly fast guitar solos. Of course, it can still mean exactly that, but happily these days the genre’s more diverse than ever. In particular, there’s a breed of bands playing ominous, black metal-influenced music that’s much more powerful than any of yer super-fast thrash noodlings. With the new Baroness album out this week, we thought we’d celebrate some of these bands, both old and new (and we’d like to acknowledge the assistance of design whiz and metal expert Manual Graphics in doing so.) Who did we miss? Let us know, nicely, in the comment section. … Read More

Music

10 Bands That Would Make Great Cults

By Tom Hawking on

The new Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros record, entitled simply Here, came out last week. We’ve never been massive fans of the band, in all honesty — their touchy-feely but weirdly blank music, and Alex Ebert’s messianic “Edward Sharpe” personality, have always given us the creeps a little bit. There’s something almost… cultish about it. Although, if nothing else, this realization got us thinking about other bands that could well be cults, and/or musicians who’d do a fine job as cult leaders. Are there any musical cults you’d be up for joining? (No, Cults don’t count.) … Read More