Welcome to the only-prevent save for cleaning your thoughts, ears, and soul of “ME!” After weeks of littering her social media money owed with clues, Taylor Swift, in the end, dropped the video for her new unmarried, a really vapid collaboration with Panic! On the Disco’s Brendon Urie, thusly leading us into the hellish #TS7 generation. But, fortunately, we’re not here to speak approximately that sonic/visible travesty. We’re right here to tell you approximately all the brilliant new tune from this week! This first-class stretch of April added a rush of first-rate new albums, such as a career-best from Kevin Morby, a fantastical slice of rock ‘n’ roll lore from The Mountain Goats, a dystopian pop dreamscape from Ireland’s SOAK and one of the most weird, most endearing singer/songwriter efforts this yr from Aldous Harding. This was additionally a huge week for anybody right here at Paste, as we joined forces with Noisetrade.Com, a streaming platform wherein artists and authors can add their works, which could then be downloaded by using fans at no cost. Read more about that interesting news right here, then be a part of us in soaking up all of this week’s excellent new tunes, performances, albums and writing approximately all of it. Find the whole thing below.
BEST ALBUMS
Kevin Morby: Oh My God
Kevin Morby has usually been a channeler of the divine. The enigmatic singer/songwriter has won over audiences far and wide with the languor of his folk-tinged rock ‘n’ roll, summoning angels, devils and saints in his lyrics whilst folding inside the attraction of folks tales, the grandiosity of nature and the benevolence of a love which could withstand the whole lot from grazed knees to deep heartache. Morby’s latest album (2017’s City Music) changed into a close to-concept record targeted on the ambiguity of a bustling New York City panorama and luxurious bucolic expanses. His fifth solo album and first double LP, Oh My God (out on April 26 through Dead Oceans), sees Morby at his most deliberately conceptual—analyzing religion from a secular lens. Oh My God got here out of a sure sense of desperation and a period of personal and shared turmoil. Back in 2016 while many of those tracks have been composed, Morby turned into going thru a breakup, Trump turned into elected President, a series of mass shootings in America had sunk anybody’s spirits, and to top all of it off, Morby changed into dwelling in Los Angeles, where big wildfires had been raging. One shape of consolation human beings flips to while the load of the sector begins to slowly overwhelm the human psyche is faith. Morby doesn’t subscribe to any unique organized faith, but he reveals endless beauty in its capability to transport people. While Oh My God is technically inside the universe, it’s not of it. Morby is one among cutting-edge rock ‘n’ roll’s finest raconteurs, and his formidable new concept album now belongs to the universe in a time whilst brushes with the divine seem fewer and farther between.
“It is no way hurts to give thanks to the nearby Gods/you in no way recognize who is probably hungry,” John Darnielle sings in “Younger.” Thank the Music Gods for the Mountain Goats, who present us with but another elegant and intricate album with In League With Dragons. If you informed me that John Darnielle was Warren Zevon’s mystery son, I might actually agree with you. His voice is breathy, his lyrics wry and his phrasing deceptively easy. But what the Mountain Goats truly excel at are their orchestrations: lush and complex but never overwhelming. There’s an detail of delusion all around the album, from the tabletop battlefield of “Younger” (“It by no means hurts to present way to the navigator/even when he’s spitting out random numbers.”) to “Clemency for the Wizard King,” mild and airy and breathy and candy and sincere and as if Tenacious D’s “Wonderboy” was written as an extreme rock song. But it’s now not just a concept album for nerds. There are noir impacts as nicely, consisting of “Waylon Jennings Live!” which paints a fabulously funny portrait of a person who is either a secret agent or a worldwide drug lord or perhaps the legend himself. The album ends with the prog-lite “Sicilian Crest,” proving that, once again, the Mountain Goats are unafraid to go a bit weird with the intention to stretch and bend among genres. With 16 albums in the back of them, it’d be clean to copy themselves and crank out another stupid recurring. But Darnielle and corporation have extra respect for his or her target audience than that, producing an album with the potency to attract in new listeners and supply thanks to those already of their enterprise. —Libby Cudmore
FKA twigs have lower back with her first new music in over three years, “Cellophane.” The music comes with a breathless, airy new video directed through common Björk collaborator Andrew Thomas Huang. “Cellophane” is one in every of FKA twigs’ maximum non-public tracks up to now, managing a length in her lifestyles while she felt she needed to rebuild herself from scratch. “Throughout my lifestyles, I’ve practiced my way to being the first-class I could be,” she says in a statement. “It didn’t paintings this time. I had to tear down every system I’d ever relied on. Go deeper. Rebuild. Start again.” The lovely video accompanying the track reveals twigs pole-dancing, falling through the area and in the end being buried in crimson mud. She educated for months in advance with pole choreographer Kelly Yvonne to research the wonderful acrobatics she performs within the video, taking to Twitter on Wednesday to thank Yvonne and Huang for their help. —Adam Weddle
