Thumbsucker

The sum total of their 2022 opus is a straight upgrade to SOUL GLO’s already brilliant back catalog, bursting with scorching new takes on old ideas and enough spirit and passion to set the entire scene ablaze…

Coming on the heels of their live Twin Peaks, this release features more of a guitar-oriented sound than previous efforts. Highlights include their cover of Jerry Lee Lewis' "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "You Better Believe It," the latter sounding like a return to the Climbing days. The rest, however, sounds like it could have been left buried under the Avalanche. Everything was downhill after this.

At first listen, The Practice of Love, Jenny Hval’s seventh full-length album, unspools with an almost deceptive ease. Across eight tracks, filled with arpeggiated synth washes and the kind of lilting beats that might have drifted, loose and unmoored, from some forgotten mid-’90s trance single, The Practice of Love feels, first and foremost, compellingly humane. Given the horror and viscera of her previous album, 2016’s Blood Bitch, The Practice of Love is almost subversive in its gentleness—a deep dive into what it means to grow older, to question one’s relationship to the earth and one’s self, and to hold a magnifying glass over the notion of what intimacy can mean. As Hval describes it, the album charts its own particular geography, a landscape in which multiple voices engage and disperse, and the question of connectedness—or lack thereof—hangs suspended in the architecture of every song. It is an album about “seeing things from above—almost like looking straight down into the ground, all of these vibrant forest landscapes, the type of nature where you might find a porn magazine at a certain place in the woods and everyone would know where it was, but even that would just become rotting paper, eventually melting into the ground.”

Avalanche is a 1974 album by Mountain. It featured the return of drummer Corky Laing, it was the band's only recording with guitarist David Perry, and the final album to feature bassist/producer Felix Pappalardi. Coming on the heels of their live Twin Peaks, this release features more of a guitar-oriented sound than previous efforts. Highlights include their cover of Jerry Lee Lewis' "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "You Better Believe It," the latter sounding like a return to the Climbing days.