This month, we’ve decided that instead of the usual food review, we would let our Marketing Director, Ellie (who has been begging for this for months), give you a few albums to soundtrack your winter break. Enjoy!
The Last Dinner Party — “From The Pyre”
Everyone in my life has heard about this album. The Last Dinner Party is a British rock band with a sound adjacent to if Chappell Roan got really into black lace and minor chords. “From The Pyre” is their sophomore album, released in mid-October, and it blew my fucking mind. The album blends rock, folk, and some other shit I don’t even know to produce a sound unlike any other. It bounces from style to style — you’ll find plenty of drama-laden indie rock in “Count The Ways” and “This is the Killer Speaking,” but also understated, dreamy pieces like the delightfully poetic “Woman is a Tree” and the lullaby-esque piano exhibit “Sail Away.” Despite its themes of death and change, the album feels like a celebration of the common emotional experiences, good and bad, that make life worth living. Go listen to it immediately.
Recommended for: Obama’s “ethereal bisexual.”
Florence + The Machine — “Everybody Scream”
Does it get cuntier than dropping your album on Halloween? That’s when Florence + The Machine, the stage name of Welsh musician Florence Welch and pioneer of a genre best described as “arena folk,” released “Everybody Scream” — her sixth album and an incredible example of art and music as a vessel for processing trauma. It opens with the titular “Everybody Scream,” taking us to the highest highs of being a performer before the rest of the album crashes us back down, spiraling further and further until the penultimate track, “You Can Have It All,” which tackles the aftermath of an incident from her previous tour where Welch had a miscarriage on stage and almost succumbed to internal bleeding. There’s a loss that comes from living as a performer, and Welch examines it closely, crooning about losses in her personal life and relationship to herself. It’s a deeply personal album that I highly recommend listening to if you’ve ever had a feeling before.
Recommended for: The melodramatically melancholic.
BETWEEN FRIENDS — “WOW!”
Okay, fine, we can do a silly one. BETWEEN FRIENDS is a bedroom pop duo from LA taking on indietronica with delightfully irreverent results, producing aggressively modern songs paired with lyrics more attuned to 2000s recession pop than typical sad-indie-boy fare. Songs like “DJ” and “1234567” are a refreshing burst of joy in a genre saturated by self-loathing songs about pretty girls whom pretty boys are too insecure to talk to, and vice versa. It swaps this to sing about what happens after the pretty girl has gotten the pretty boy — generally, stupid shit (“BLOW” and “American Bitch”). It’s a celebration of the stupidity of youth, and it makes a great palate cleanser after listening to the other two albums on this list.
Recommended for: The young, dumb, and full of cum.
