Record Revue: Madison Rose, John Calvin Abney, and HOAX
Welcome to Record Revue, an EP and album review series
There’s never any telling what music will move you. Whether you click on a link in a PR pitch or stumble upon something on Spotify, an album can be revolutionary to your emotions. It can arrive in the knick of time to save you or make you question reality through a fresher, sharper, brighter lens. Or it can groove so hard and dirty that you escape from the world for 40 minutes. Just long enough to recharge before cycling through terribly headlines and doomscrolling on Twitter. It’s all the same, only a different day.
On the latest Record Revue, there are three albums that have moved me beyond belief and arrested my soul. I won’t bore you with more blathering, and I’ll let the music speak for itself with a set of capsule-sized reviews. Have a seat, pour a whiskey, and bask in the beauty of art.
Madison Rose, TECHNICOLOR
The veins buried inside Madison Rose’s debut album, TECHNICOLOR, emanate prismatic shards of light. Paired with synths pulsating and criss-crossing, as cosmic stitches blanket Rose’s unwaveringly cool vocal, there appears a glowing beacon for future pop breaking through the haze. “Dancin’ Till We Die” and “Lost My Mind (to the DJ)” wash over you, casting your form in satin and lace, before “ICONIC!” cracks the back of your skull — simply serving as salves for the rage-based poison lobbied at queer youth through disgusting bits of legislation. “I shit rainbows, bitch,” Rose clicks her tongue on the latter track. She sashays through life as though it’s all performance art, and in many ways, she’s right. It’s all a once-in-a-lifetime exhibit, and if we don’t do what we want now, we’ll never get another chance. We’ve paid the price, and we must deliver. So, we might as well live as unapologetically as we can. Amidst doomscrolling, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees and if any of this is actually worth it. But it is. TECHNICOLOR is irrefutable proof that the world needs art and art made by someone exactly like Madison Rose. “Moonlight” burns somber, while the titular track strikes a match on the bones and “Pure Oxygen” is worthy of a Robyn or Tegan & Sara record. Make no mistake, though, Madison Rose is a visionary of her own making. She conjures up passionate and heartfelt pop music that’ll turn you inside out. And maybe burn away those charred edges in the process.
John Calvin Abney, Tourist
The windswept coastline basks beneath a scarlet smolder. Clouds feel stationary and permanently transitory, as though the picture lives in both the present and future. John Calvin Abney presents you with this startlingly probing landscape and invites you to take a dive into a kind of freedom that exhilarates and replenishes. Tourist canters along in Abney’s determination to see the world in a variety of shimmering lens, crafted with a creaky folk base, on which he then dolls up his sweetly supple phrasing. “Call Me Achilles” grooves like a kid’s twist top, sonic reverberations emanating across space, and “Holy Golden West” mirrors time’s biting tick, as he himself is just a tumbleweed at the mercy of his angsty heartbeat and the humid summer air. Amidst his never-ending travels, etched through “Long Black River” and “Leave Me at the Shoreline,” he takes a reprieve with “Watch Me Go (Back in Time),” tripping along as a babbling brook does, a hypnotic dose of serenity and calm. “I never met a quiet so loud,” he acknowledges the crushing weight of solitude on “By Your Leave.” With the world in such a damaged state, Tourist is the sort of record that cleanses you, washing away the grime of the day’s headlines, and you reemerge as if changed somehow.
HOAX, b?
“Stop learning to show it off. Stop posting. Stop taking pictures for them. Stop tagging. Can’t you just let it happen?” a robotic voice pleads. The spoken word piece, titled “bleach,” doesn’t appear until well over mid-way through b?, HOAX’s debut long player, and punctures the listener’s skin. It draws blood. A lot of blood. But it’s that blood, the singular life serum pumping in all our veins, that makes us feel alive. The duo — made of singers, songwriters, and musicians Michael Raj and Frantz Cesar — manifests an answer to this question through an excavation of self and purpose. “Take a fucking breath,” the same metallic, disembodied entity scolds. Across a bold and ambitious 17-song story, HOAX attempt to make sense of existence and the rat race, a championship marathon that only awards you if you eat the competition. There’s more to life, to love, to being. To be is something of true serenity, the duo posits. “Man, where can I get some humanity around here?” Raj proposes another urgent inquiry with the title track. It’s a five-minute creed that suggest humanity is only ever present and alert when we don’t give a fuck anymore and allow inner peace to bleed out. There’s that blood again. From extending one’s sense of being to passersby in our lives (“unconditional”) to processing time’s unwaveringly cruel hand on existence (“wasting time”), b? is wonderfully confrontational, yet its warmth radiates from somewhere within. It’s as though the album experience itself has instilled within your bones what it means to simply be in a place in time. Funny how life works its way in untangling those things you’d let knot and rot. Perhaps my recent name change has something to do with it, but I’ve found a new era of peace for myself, both through this record and realizing that as the older I get the moments seem even more transitory. I’m waiting for something, and now b? is the answer. Just be.
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