IVY – Hush (Velvet The Label) (13th Floor Album Review)
Ivy is one of those bands whose beginnings may sound humble and ordinary, but whose debut album Hush, surges with scale and ambition.
John Bradbury
About John Bradbury
Posts by John Bradbury:
Grant-Lee Phillips – In the Hour of Dust (Yep Roc) (13th Floor Album Review)
Grant-Lee Phillips is a songwriter who moves between the intimate and the expansive. From the widescreen alt-rock of Grant Lee Buffalo to the quieter folk of his solo records, he places private anxieties within a larger frame of history, myth and politics. In the Hour of Dust, his twelfth solo album, continues in that spirit.
Anna Tivel – Animal Poem (Fluff and Gravy) (13th Floor Album Review)
Anna Tivel has always blurred the line between songwriting and poetry. With each record she refines her ability to draw whole worlds in her lyrical stories, finding light and sorrow in equal measure.
Big Thief – Double Infinity (4AD) (13th Floor Album Review)
Big Thief… their Double Infinity is a record of continuity and rupture, intimacy and expansion. It feels like their most communal work, stitched together with the voices and playing of friends from the experimental, ambient, and folk underground, while also weaving the precise and universal into the lyric detail.
Georgia Lines – The Guest House (13th Floor EP Review)
Georgia Lines sings with a voice that feels both delicate and commanding, as quiet as a whisper caught between piano notes and as powerful as a line soaring above sweeping arrangements. With The Guest House, she reaffirms her ability to move between tenderness and strength while embracing new textures and greater rhythmic variety.
The Beths – Straight Line Was a Lie (Anti-) (13th Floor Album Review)
From the first fuzzed-up guitar riff to the final jubilant outro, The Beths’ fourth album, Straight Line Was a Lie, reveals a band in full command of its material and entering a new creative phase.
Kathleen Edwards – Billionaire (Dualtone) (13th Floor Album Review)
Kathleen Edwards has always been a songwriter who tells stories through the details: a hockey team that cannot win, a car driven across Los Angeles, a door painted pink. Through vivid detail and a deep sense of place, she turns the specific into something relatable and universal.
Wolf Alice – The Clearing (Mushroom) (13th Floor Album Review)
With The Clearing, their fourth album, Wolf Alice channel every lesson from the past decade into a record that feels elemental in its confidence. This is a band deep in the groove of their own creative force.
Marissa Nadler – New Radiations (Bella Union) (13th Floor Album Review)
New Radiations, the tenth studio album by Marissa Nadler, is a slow-burning, hypnotic immersion into shadowed soundscapes and aching introspection.
Hayes Carll – We’re Only Human (HWY 87) (13th Floor Album Review)
With We’re Only Human, his tenth album, Hayes Carll trades the wry observations of modern absurdity for something more introspective and tender, though no less sharp.