SOUND BITES

  Well, that was quite the year, huh? While the impact of Covid is still being felt, the gradual relaxation of lockdowns and mandates allowed for 2022 to feel like a proper "back to business" year in the world of music; whereas a great number of albums saw delays in the immediate wake of the pandemic, by the beginning of 2022 the floodgates were beginning to open. Several in-the-works releases that otherwise could have seen releases in 2020 or 2021 ended up coming down the hopper this year, as evidenced by the record-setting amount of reviews I posted (nearly a hundred, up from a previous record of 70). Not only that, there were also plenty of artists with pent up creative energy going super-sized with their output in 2022, whether deciding to split their projects up into portions, going for double albums or, in one notable case, repeating an outlandish stunt of releasing five albums in the same year. Of course, the outside world played a huge part in the records that came ou...

  At this point, I don't think there's any doubt as to who the hardest working band in the world is; just over ten years removed from the release of their debut album, Changes marks the fifth this year for King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, and mind-blowing 23rd overall. Averaging more than two albums a year is unfathomable for most bands, let alone doing so with as few missteps as KGLW have had; while a handful of their records are admittedly weaker in ambition and/or execution, the majority of the Aussie collective's output has been more or less on point, even as they tirelessly juggle musical styles and compositional stunts. Just this year, they've released not one but two albums centered around the rhythm of a ticking clock ( Made in Timeland and Laminated Denim , which combine its four 15-minute tracks for exactly an hour of jammy goodness), a part catch-all of unreleased songs from recent projects augmented with their first post-Covid recordings (double album...

  In the nearly twenty years that Dan Mangan has been recording, his music has frequently undergone subtle transitions, while remaining consistently earnest; the acoustic folk of his early years peaked with his 2009 breakthrough Nice, Nice, Very Nice before his  sound opened up to additional orchestration and instrumentation on 2011's Oh Fortune . Club Meds , credited to Mangan and Blacksmith, followed four years later as a full blooded indie rock album that heralded some of the sonic experimentation that would carry over to 2018's More or Less ; that album played out like a culmination of sorts, a sum of all the parts picked up along the way and a masterful record that cemented Mangan's place as one of Canada's premier singer/songwriters and paved the way for an exciting future. Of course, we all know how the pandemic got in the way of everyone's plans; for Mangan, the by-product of Covid was having to craft his follow-up album via remote contact with co-writer/pr...

  When you're thirty years deep into a well established career, no one really expects anything from you anymore; in the case of Sloan, what can we honestly ask of them at this point? Over the course of their twelve albums, they helped usher in a new wave of Canadian alternative rock, reinvented themselves as nostalgic power pop specialists, conquered the radio with sharp hooks, and adapted themselves as necessary while sticking close to their core sound, earning legend status among multiple generations of fans along the way. Even more impressively, they've done it all without swapping out a single member, all four of whom worked in tandem to achieve everything they've gotten over the span of their incredible and incredibly consistent career. If we've learned anything about Sloan as fans, it's that staggering consistency that's become as much a calling card as their formidable harmonies; a couple of outliers notwithstanding, each Sloan album has arrived as a supp...

  It took a little longer than usual to get around to this review, for a few reasons; I started a new day job about a week before Arctic Monkeys' seventh album was released, then pretty much immediately caught Covid-19 (aside from a few rough days it wasn't too awful, although there's a lingering cough that still persists every now and then as I write this). Coming out of that, in getting used to the fluctuating hours and lost sleep, I kind of got beaten out of my previous routines. The other reason, however, has nothing to do with my personal commitment levels and everything to do with the record itself. I have found it an incredibly daunting task to listen to this album all the way through, because it just doesn't hold my interest. The head scratching left turn Arctic Monkeys took in 2018 on Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino wasn't a one-off, with the band reprising their roles as a burned out lounge act once again on The Car . To be fair, there are subtle diff...