Arts & Culture

070 Shake Album Review: Petrichor

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The definition of petrichor is “a distinctive, earthy, usually pleasant odor that is associated with rainfall especially when following a warm, dry period.” 070 Shake spells her own meaning of Petrichor with her most recent album: She bathes in the lush bass tones of a new kind of rain, a new day after a long night out. 

Following her 2022 sophomore album You Can’t Kill Me, Petrichor takes a daunting yet

rejuvenating new look at what love is. Many of the songs in the collection emerge from the witching hours, where 070 Shake thrives in concocting reflective spells. On “Sin,” the opening track, smooth, layered vocals give way to the spacy outro: “chasing after waters, chase the moonlight.” Listeners are sure to be reminded of the  2019 track “Under The Moon” featured on her debut album Modus Vivendi; as long she’s been performing as 070 Shake, Danielle Balbuena has been a creature of the night. As this is the first album Balbuena has released since the beginning of her celebrity relationship with Lily-Rose Depp, Petrichor’s elusive, supernatural takes on love are fitting. In “Pieces of You,” Balbuena infuses misery and wonder within the discovery of another.

Arts & Culture

SOLAR FLARE | Songs for Superstition

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Looked over your shoulder recently? Biting the nails you’ve forgotten to clip? If you’re not anxious about work piling up or time passing by, you should be paranoid about the unprecedented weather. Why are there still leaves on the trees? Just yesterday, I thought I caught a whiff of spring.

Arts & Culture

Lyrical Fishing: Haley Heynderickx’ Seed of a Seed

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Like a northerly loon lingering too long in the cooling waters of early November, Haley Heynderickx’s voice calls luminous, haunting. Her soft, empowered vocals layer in gentle strokes over her defining acoustic guitar, emboldened by  swaying strings and horns. Her message is profuse. Aware of itself, Heynderickx’s second studio album Seed of a Seed is simultaneously personal and prescriptive. Released last Friday Nov.

Arts & Culture

The Smile’s ‘Cutouts’ Reviewed: Expanding on Radiohead’s Legacy

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The gaunt, ghostly, yet somehow still youthful voice of Thom Yorke weaves with electronic horns and strings on lead track “Foreign Spies,” the opener of The Smile’s recent album, Cutouts, released Friday Oct. 4. It all lounges atop a lascivious, eerie syncopation familiar to listeners of The Smile. Formed six years ago, the band doesn’t deign to refuse Yorke’s 45 year long career; the dark lyricism, cunning juxtaposition and reflexive aural motifs draw on and rework Radiohead’s revered discography and The Smile’s earlier releases A Light for Attracting Attention (2022) and Wall of Eyes (January 2024). Cutouts aims for a cohesive theme on their trajectory as a band.

Arts & Culture

The Titans of Anabel Taylor Chapel: Richards, Yearsley and the Baroque Organ

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Last fall, I had the pleasure of taking David Yearsley’s course on Music Journalism. Within discussions of style, diction and structure, Yearsley’s classes taught close analysis of journalistic delivery and choice of words. Unlike most of my English classes, where professors struggle to hook the attention of non-majors and majors alike, Yearsley pulls his students’ personalities into the class, creating a parallel between our learning of a journalist’s writing, character and opinion in the context of our own work. 

In the fall, we each wrote nine articles, including a book review and an obituary. For my live music review, I chose to attend my first organ concert, a part of the Midday Music concert series, where I saw Yearsley’s partner, Annette Richards, perform a series of enchanting Bach pieces in Anabel Taylor Chapel. Writing about music I was so unfamiliar with should have been challenging, but because of the way the class had sharpened my writing skills, it flowed with the magic that the Bach scores had borne in the space.