I left the recent Purity Ring concert with two predominant thoughts. One, that magic might actually be real, but real in a terrifying and vaguely apocalyptic sort of way. And two, that a conversation about live set of Megan James and Corin Roddick, who make up Purity Ring, would be crippled without some remarks on the album as well. Their musical canon consists of just one album, Shrines, and as such Purity Ring inhabits a moment when their recorded album and live performances are fundamentally one body (a situation which works particularly well for them, because Shrines is itself sort of a singular idea manifested in eleven subtly differing tracks).

Old. Irrelevant. Washed up. Out of touch. Creatively dead.

Anyone who has followed Bob Dylan’s career over the past half-century has probably applied, or heard some version of these terms applied, to the past ten years—a period that will probably be remembered as the artist’s lost decade. And with some justification.

After all, since 2001, Dylan has given us Love and Theft, Modern Times and Together Through Life, three albums that range from the merely mediocre to the truly awful. Anyone who felt that he had lost his edge is entirely justified.

The personal pronoun “I” appears a dozen times in the review in reference to me (it also appears several times in quoted lyrics), which is a lot. In my two previous, decidedly positive reviews, I used “I” a combined four times to talk about the most recent albums of Twin Shadow and Nas. A dozen is a lot for a Four review as well, Spin and Pitchfork, probably the two best known sources for alternative music criticism, both gave the album decidedly negative reviews without ever leaning on first person. Both of them dealt exclusively with the album in front of them, criticizing it for what it did. While I panned the album as well, I justified it by talking about how annoyed I was, rather than by pointing out the parts of the music that were doing the annoying.

The act of riding a motorcycle puts before safety and stability, impulse, adrenaline and image. For George Lewis Jr., it’s a vehicle not for traversing physical spaces so much as those of the mind, and it seems to work best when ridden solo. The ride is then somewhat egotistical and nihilistic, and that combination apparently makes quite a good muse for a pop album. Confess, Lewis’s second LP under the …continue…

Kristian Matsson first became well-known as the Tallest Man on Earth for the simple power of his performances. He seemed a pure troubadour of the venerable American folk tradition, performing alone on stage with just his voice and guitar. It’s a mode that works when the performer exudes an air of prophetic mystery, when the music is beautiful and any apparent meaning gets tucked behind a shroud of symbolic imagery. …continue…