Reverb is a weekly collaborative music review within the Arts section that explores new albums and covers new artists, whether indie or mainstream. Our goal is to explore and examine everything that modern music has to offer and to educate anyone who cares.
Courtney Barnett’s “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit," released March 23, starts with a story of a man who cut work to go watch the world from the top of a skyscraper. Barnett speaks from his perspective: "I'm not suicidal, just idling insignificantly / I come up here for perception and clarity / I like to imagine I'm playing SimCity." There isn’t any sting or irony to the song; it’s simply the story of a man “idling insignificantly.” These words capture the entire essence of the Australian singer-songwriter's garage rock album. It’s an album full of stories about the mundane and inconsequential. The beauty of Barnett’s work, however, is in the way she captures the ordinary -- with shades of complexity, empathy and half-humored boredom.
The best hip-hop record in recent memory opens with a simple sound bit, sampled off of the 1974 Boris Gardiner song, “Every N****r is a Star” [this song title was altered during the editing process]. Kendrick Lamar’s "To Pimp a Butterfly" (2015) goes on to reaffirm, reject, tear, mend and scream this simple message of racial self-love. This is the record Kendrick Lamar has been waiting his entire career to make. It stands as a culmination of ideas previously established in Kendrick's work and fleshed out in full here; ideas about society, music, duty, evil and the way all these trappings are intertwined and self-propagating within his psyche. "To Pimp a Butterfly" is introspective, but is also driven by a simple mission of spreading light in a space that is dark – whether that space is Kendrick’s own mind or the community that surrounds him.
Reverb is a weekly collaborative music review within the Arts section that explores new albums and covers new artists, whether indie or mainstream. Our goal is to explore and examine everything that modern music has to offer and to educate anyone who cares.It’s been a solid 30 years since the '80s ...
