Tag Archives: alternative

Best of Pop 2021

by Dæv Tremblay


Let’s hear it for the best pop albums of 2021!

Number Five: Honne – Let’s Just Say the World Ended a Week from Now, What Would You Do?



I know next to nothing on Honne, but I was really hooked by 2018’s Love Me / Love Me Not, and here I am, in 2021, starting my top 5 of the year with this album! It’s the most straightforwardly pop album of the bunch, but it’s great, dynamic, and has a lot of interesting ideas! So, you should definitely check it out!

Number Four: Half Waif – Mythopoetics


I’ve always … Read more

Zayn – Fields of God

by Dæv Tremblay

a1980823415_16Zayn is a Croatian post-metal quartet, and Fields of God is their third release; it’s also their lengthiest, at around 30 minutes, which barely puts it as an LP.

The music itself is some instrumental amalgamation of post-metal and progressive metal. Some grooves are reminiscent of early Tool, maybe because of the prominent bass guitar. Contrary to many post and prog outfits these days, they don’t do into lengthy songs. The most extensive one on this album is the seven-minute title track. This is also pretty contradictory with their focus on atmosphere rather than polyrhythmics, or technicality. Not that these … Read more

Ilevens have released a video for their single Drowns

by Dæv Tremblay

Microtonal rock band Ilevens, led by the mind of Brendan Byrnes, is one of the only examples I know of of a microtonal band ready for live performances. They use 22 notes per octave instruments and have released a bunch of demos that were sung in a made-up language that I’ll refer to as ilevian from now on, but they seem to have gone back to good ol’ English for this song.

The 2-track Live in Studio mini-album is available on their bandcamp page for “name your price”!
… Read more

Review: Rise – Resilience

by Dæv Tremblay
1You, mere mortals, subordinate readers, can only listen to one of the songs from Rise‘s Resilience upcoming album, through the video above: About Duality. But trust me, your supreme guide and musical spirit, this album will be on a lot of year’s end lists, ours first! Let’s dig a bit to try and understand why.

The manifesto of Rise is all about bringing back romanticism in modern music, specifically a blend of metal, hardcore, metalcore, alternative, and other trace elements. Romance is all about evoking emotions, stimulating the imaginary, and blowing an atmosphere around itself, engulfing the beholder … Read more

News: Rise, the romantic band

by Dæv Tremblay

Rise is a French band, probably rooted in black metal, but with very few of it in its music. There’s alt sounds, indie, and other styles of metal mixed together in such a way as to, like the band itself puts it, subordinate form to content, encourage freedom of treatment, emphasize imagination, emotion, and introspection, and seek and ecstasy through dreams, morbid and sublime, which is the very definition of “romanticism”. That’s why they call themselves romantic, in the literal sense, and I agree with that, listening to their song About Duality.

And I think you should, … Read more