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Review

Oklou: “viscus” [ft. FKA twigs] Track Review

by jummy84 October 12, 2025

written by jummy84

Pregnancy changed Oklou’s mind as well as her body. “I feel like my consciousness has naturally, without me even trying, gotten rid of any source of stress and anxiety,” she told FKA twigs when the two artists spoke for Highsnobiety earlier this year. On “viscus,” from the forthcoming deluxe edition of Oklou’s debut album, choke enough, the French electronic pop star-in-the-making meets one of her direct influences in the ether. At first, the track sounds right at home among the album’s filigreed miniatures, but then the tinny percussion, vaporwave synthesisers, and chamber orchestration begin to interlock at new angles, forming a glittering exoskeleton.

As she told Pitchfork in our cover story, Oklou’s creative process runs on late-night Logic sessions and long periods of isolation. “viscus” yearns to swap digital ideas for real bodies. “I get lost so deep inside me,” Oklou intones—perhaps a characteristically oblique nod to the chronic stomachaches that she and twigs had bonded over. “The body is a temple/Am I worshipping too hard?” When twigs’ voice enters, it’s from the other side of the stereo mix, beckoning us from the cloud down to the club. Oklou has said that she used to dance far more than she does today; on “viscus,” we hear those muscles start to engage again.

October 12, 2025 0 comments

Music

John Lennon / Yoko Ono / Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band / Elephant’s Memory: Power to the People (The Ultimate Collection) Album Review

by jummy84 October 11, 2025

written by jummy84

At the One To One concerts, Lennon displayed a certain nervous energy, which pairs well with the sleazeball boogie of Elephant’s Memory, a local NYC band best known for its contributions to the soundtrack of Midnight Cowboy. Elephant’s Memory served as the backing band for Some Time, but were too slack and lackadaisical to get through the One To One concerts without the reinforcement of drummer Jim Keltner, who helps give the performance a serious, heavy swing.

Frontloading Power to the People with the One To One performances—the two sets are here, along with a hybrid highlights disc—illustrates how Lennon spent the early ’70s wallowing in the pleasures of old-time rock’n’roll. Even when he and Ono are having an improvisatory freak-out with Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, it’s rooted in basic three-chord changes. Almost all of the songs John and Yoko wrote during this period are deliberately simple: “Sisters, O Sisters” is a revved-up girl group number, “Attica State” and “John Sinclair” are straightforward blues, “The Luck of the Irish” is a folk ballad, ”New York City” is high-octane Chuck Berry boogie.

The exception to the rule is the one song of the period that isn’t here: “Woman is the N***** of the World,” an overblown wall-of-sound homage intended as an anthem of feminist solidarity, inspired by a slogan Yoko Ono likely adapted from a line in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The box set ignores that track (despite the fact that Lennon chose it as Some Time’s single), cutting it out of the new mixes of the album and the accompanying concerts. Its absence helps shift the story towards Lennon’s continued return to the big bang of 1950s rock’n’roll during this volatile period. Left to his own devices, he sings oldies: the last song disc here is a “Home Jam,” where he’s sitting around the house strumming Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly tunes. On its cousin “Studio Jam” disc, Lennon leads his band through Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley rockers. These passages are loose, maybe even to a fault, but they’re charming, capturing one of the greatest rock vocalists singing unencumbered by an audience.

These two discs of informal jams are the ideal coda to Power to the People, which chronicles the era when Lennon was keenly aware that he was performing at all times. It wasn’t just that he was playing his first live shows since the breakup of the Beatles. Lennon and Ono were omnipresent in 1971 and 1972, heading off to Ann Arbor to play a rally to free John Sinclair, strumming songs with Phil Ochs in a hotel room, accepting seemingly any offer to appear on TV, as evidenced by their appearance on the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy telethon. A rousing reggae-fied version of “Give Peace a Chance,” plucked from the telethon, features Lewis himself as part of the onstage chorus; his appearance crystallizes the essential oddness of this period. Even as he got his hands grimy in the leftist underground, Lennon remained one of the most famous men in the world, using mainstream platforms to preach politics to the masses. The dissonance of this intersection remains intriguing, long after the headlines have faded away.

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John Lennon, Yoko Ono, The Plastic Ono Band & Elephant’s Memory: Power to the People (The Ultimate Collection)

October 11, 2025 0 comments

Music

Album Review: Madi Diaz, ‘Fatal Optimist’

by jummy84 October 10, 2025

written by jummy84

Singer-songwriter’s new Fatal Optimist scales back her sound, but not her devastating emotional honesty

Madi Diaz has a talent for brief, yet devastating observations: “Looking at who you are and what I can live with/I can imagine myself as a picture of something different,” she whisper-chokes on “Hope Less,” the situationship-rationalizing opening track to her seventh album. The lyric’s power is heightened by the arrangement surrounding it — just Diaz and her acoustic guitar, in a room so silent its settling is nearly audible. The same goes for much of Fatal Optimist, which largely eschews the more robust instrumentation of 2024’s Weird Faith in favor of stripped-down recordings that thrust her lyrics to the forefront.

Diaz, a songwriter’s songwriter who has spent time in Harry Styles’ backing band, began working on Fatal Optimist after a post-breakup seclusion on an island, where she immersed herself in writing about the frustrations she’d experienced. That extended catharsis led to acceptance, a journey mirrored by the album’s progression. “Feel Something” seethes with exasperation over a relationship locked in an increasingly anhedonic cycle, Diaz wishing she was “someone who doesn’t know your middle name” as an electric guitar that’s blown out like a bruise shimmers around her. Diaz has a rounded, plainly emotional alto that adds pathos to the more downtrodden lyrics — like those on “Flirting,” a morning-after breakdown of a rupture in trust with a spare voice-and-piano arrangement that has the weight of knowingly receiving the silent treatment. “Heavy Metal,” meanwhile, is a stunner, Diaz unpacking the ways her resilience and her hardness meld together with growing intensity until the song’s end, when she repeats the word “heavy” enough times to make it fold in on itself.

On the closing title track, light begins to filter in even as Diaz keeps her emotions close. She tempers the thrill of meeting somebody with whom spending time “might be hot, and it might be fun” with her “fatal optimist” tendencies of seeing where things could end, and for the first time, a full band comes in to help propel Diaz along the path to openness. Even though she’s wary — “I hate being right,” she sing-songs, repeating it enough times for it to feel like a mantra — she’s letting her doubts fall, and letting the world become just a bit more filled-in. The arc of Fatal Optimist and Diaz’s perceptive, insistent songwriting make that movement, even with its hesitation, feel like a victory.

October 10, 2025 0 comments

Music

Kelly Moran: Don’t Trust Mirrors Album Review

by jummy84 October 10, 2025

written by jummy84

The record’s five earliest pieces (the first four tracks, plus “Reappearing”) date from 2019 and 2020, when Moran wanted to take the prepared piano to the dancefloor. It’s easy to imagine album opener “Echo in the Field” blasting out over a late-night festival stage: A repeating synth line introduces buzzing bass chords, with the chiming piano carrying a clear melody over the top. Don’t Trust Mirrors isn’t really a dance record, though, and this club-friendly feel disappears quickly as Moran focuses on the timbral character of the prepared piano. “Prism drift” and “Sans sodalis” are built on spacious, ringing harmonics, not likely to move bodies, but to leave them stock-still and blissfully overwhelmed. These versions were later reworked into their more subdued partners, “Hypno” and “Sodalis (II),” for Moves in the Field, and their effect here is like seeing a familiar stage play shot in IMAX, with small, expressive gestures made grandly cinematic.

In the second half of Don’t Trust Mirrors, Moran largely works in the opposite direction, translating those songs written for Disklavier into pieces for prepared piano and synth. These tracks stand out from their originals through textural variety rather than compositional complexity. “Systems,” for example, is recognizable as Moves in the Field’s “Superhuman,” but it finds new force in the prepared piano’s clanging strings. At times, it sounds more like gamelan and with a bit of subtle synth, it becomes quietly sinister. The more variable sound of Moran’s electronics can completely alter a track, too: “Leitmotif,” a delicate little thing that unfurls like a rose petal on Moves in the Field, is big and airy and resonant as “Cathedral,” with tinkling notes spilling into an ambient wash of synth and disappearing in the cavernous distance.

Companion albums are nothing new for Moran, who released the improvisatory rush that became Ultraviolet later, unedited, as the Origin EP. But the relationship between Don’t Trust Mirrors and its predecessor is different, more involved, and ultimately more illuminating: Neither of these albums could exist without the other; neither is a first draft, though they each started where the other left off. Hold them up next to each other and you can see Moran reflected more accurately than in either: a picture of the artist becoming herself.

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Kelly Moran: Don’t Trust Mirrors

October 10, 2025 0 comments

Music

Blawan: SickElixir Album Review | Pitchfork

by jummy84 October 10, 2025

written by jummy84

Spirals of blaring noise echo as though chained to the bottom of some long-forgotten cistern. A voice, far removed from normal diction, barks syllables in a harsh, lurching cadence. What remains of regular meter exists only as a log of controlled chaos—fetid, cavernous rhythms that batter a crumbling foundation. It all sounds ready to break apart. British producer Blawan holds it together on “The GL Lights,” the opening track of SickElixir. He extracts techno from within dense strata of mechanized grit, maneuvering through sharp edges and switchbacks until the mangled frame contorts into a new picture. The aesthetic is startling; his corroded dance music, steeped in hellish glossolalia, conjures a vast, violent, and unknowable world.

It hasn’t always been like this. When charting his development, the artist born Jamie Roberts recalls feverish after-school drum practice and a fascination with the metallic shrieks of an industrial mincer that soundtracked work as a maggot farmer in South Yorkshire. In his earliest releases, tidy post-dubstep singles for labels like the legendary Hessle Audio, this fascination manifested as mechanistic perfection: skeletal grooves dominated by surgically arranged percussion. As his experience grew, his work underwent a sea change. The beats became noisier, grittier, more organic, without compromising the slick arrangements. By the time of his first album, 2018’s Wet Will Always Dry, many of Roberts’ now-perennial fascinations were beginning to calcify: “Tasser,” for instance, propelled its eroded techno pulse forward with a throaty digital rasp. A new poetics of distortion was taking shape.

Seven years on, the leering, all-encompassing grime of SickElixir melds dozens of Roberts’ subsequent discoveries and revelations into a brutish, unhinged gestalt; its clamorous swagger makes “Tasser” look like a curio. Tracks groan and caterwaul as though wounded, cataloging a vast library of scabbed-over synth leads and guttural vocal hooks. The sound rides an uncanny middle between the scratchy, live-wire jam sessions of Syclops and the kitschy throat-singing augments of Ummet Ozcan. Roberts operates with finesse, finding a distinct place in the mix for each element in his tapestry. The yo-yoing volume dynamics in lead single “NOS”—from ruthless, blown-out bass to a clipped whisper—are at once organic and painstakingly contrived, compressing opposed timbres into a continuous, unified eruption.

October 10, 2025 0 comments

Music

Rauw Alejandro: Cosa Nuestra: Capítulo 0 Album Review

by jummy84 October 9, 2025

written by jummy84

It’s rare these days for an album to be allowed to stand on its own. No matter how good a record is or how well-received, musicians can’t help but make sequels. The album is completely different but also still the album. Every eusexua has an afterglow. Though we are born to die, we are promised paradise. The same themes are mined, remixed, subverted, and marketed as a continuation until the album cycle lemon runs dry, bitter, or both.

Rauw Alejandro’s a particular fan of this framework. Real fans remember both slices of Trap Cake. He followed up magnum opus Saturno with Playa Saturno, a forehead kiss of an album tack-on. Cosa Nuestra’s “chapter zero,” billed as a prequel to last year’s album, is four songs shorter than the original 18-track LP. In other words, it’s a full album of its own, with a largely new sound and focus, even if it’s meant to exist in the cigar-perfumed universe Rauw has been wearing vintage suits in for over a year now.

Where Cosa Nuestra channeled salsa romántica greats, Capítulo 0 taps into syncretism, ancestry, and Puerto Rican folk sounds. This includes bomba, the Afro-Puertorican genre rooted firmly in the drum that forms the backbone of several tracks on Capítulo 0, including swoon-worthy opening track “Carita Linda,” rife with shakers and a call-and-response that feels like godly invocation.

Despite Cosa Nuestra’s aesthetic, salsa wasn’t quite in the room with us on that release; here, it is relegated to the album’s three-part finale. “Callejón de los Secretos,” with Chilean-Mexican musician Mon Laferte, is a high-class duet out of an old-school lounge. Energetic “FALSEDAD” sees Rauw decry a past love to congas and salsa horns with the heartbroken mastery of Frankie Ruiz (whose “Tú Con El,” a crucial cover from this era, Rauw nods to in the lyrics). Closer “Mirando Al Cielo” is an ode to Puerto Rico that evokes the mysticism coursing through Capítulo 0: “Mary is taking care of me/Yemayá is opening the seas,” he sings in Spanish, conjuring a divine protection that’s in line with salsa classics since the genre’s onset and closing the Cosa Nuestra era with his best vocals to date. That it feels a little late doesn’t lessen the impact, or execution.

October 9, 2025 0 comments

Music

Malibu: Vanities Album Review | Pitchfork

by jummy84 October 9, 2025

written by jummy84

Vanities, the debut full-length by French producer Barbara Braccini, aka Malibu, is equal parts devotion and alienation. Her short, lush ambient compositions layer formless washes of synth with field recordings of city sounds; seamy and ominous, they evoke haunted industrial areas or images of abandoned business districts during Covid. At the same time, the songs on Vanities highlight Braccini’s clarion, wordless vocals—hymnlike passages that attempt to thaw the production’s frosty veneer. The feeling Vanities evokes has, in my mind, more in common with clinical, alienating, but ultimately invigorating films like Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or Spring Breakers than it does any of Braccini’s contemporaries.

Vanities was made largely in Stockholm but finished in Los Angeles, and it feels unmistakably like a piece of California noir. From the sirens that drift through the thickly atmospheric opener “Nu” to the new-age wash of “The Hills” to the voice that whispers, “It’s our secret, you can’t tell anybody,” like a sample from some ’90s thriller, on closer “Watching People Die,” Vanities revels in the chilly contradictions of the City of Angels—its pervasive warmth and the way its layout forces a sense of atomization, the vague spirituality and the potent sense of moneyed privilege. At times, the album recalls the ambient-leaning back half of Chromatics’ Kill for Love, another serotonin-depleted record that feels like a strung-out drive through the city in the early morning hours.

This palette isn’t wholly dissimilar from Palaces of Pity, Braccini’s 2022 EP. The difference now is that everything feels crisper and more expansive: Braccini’s voice is clear and high in the mix, as opposed to a whisper beneath the shoegazey wash; individual samples, like the crashing waves on “Spicy City” and “What Is It That Breaks,” can be heard clearly amid the noise. Listening to Vanities after Palaces of Pity, it feels like a weight has been lifted; for every song on Vanities like “A World Beyond Lashes,” which feels like it’s collapsing in on itself beneath layers of noise, there’s one like “Lactonic Crush,” whose hard-won lightness and gently swelling synth recalls dream trance at its foggiest.

October 9, 2025 0 comments

Fashion

Noyz Only Human Fragrance Gourmand Perfume Review

by jummy84 October 9, 2025

written by jummy84

Notes of vanilla bean, ambroxan, and cedarwood blend with invigorating pink pepper, bergamot, and lily to create a scent that’s complex, addictive, and perfect for fall. Combining vanilla with woody notes isn’t unheard of (Case in point: Another editor-beloved scent, 7 Virtues’ Vanilla Woods.) But as the name suggests, Only Human is all about tapping into the sensual alchemy of two people connecting — per the brand, it’s rumored to smell a bit different on everyone, à la Glossier You.

October 9, 2025 0 comments

Music

Mobb Deep: Infinite Album Review

by jummy84 October 8, 2025

written by jummy84

On paper, every dial imaginable has been set back. Outside of a stray COVID mention and a dumb Havoc bar about getting canceled for joking about someone’s chromosomes, references are either era-specific (“Taj Mahal” is named for the formerly Trump-owned casino) or universal enough to not matter. Instead of the stable of producers behind Infamous, Havoc handles 11 of the album’s 15 beats, with Alchemist embracing his grimy Murda Muzik and Infamy roots on the other four.

The best Havoc beats from Mobb Deep’s prime took familiar sounds and bent them into menacing shapes. Here, tracks like “The M. The O. The B. The B.” and “Mr. Magik” mix that menace with the muted drum patterns he used on Kanye’s The Life of Pablo, giving the low-end even more depth. Alchemist, for his part, falls back on the style that made him famous—all gutter drums and echoing samples. The glitzy fuzz of “Taj Mahal,” in particular, sounds like it was pulled off a lesser-known Street Sweepers mixtape, while “Score Points” and “My Era” wouldn’t sound out of place on his collaborative albums with Prodigy.

Prodigy has no half-way appearances, either; he has at least one verse on every song, and does the hooks for a chunk of them. P’s delivery is as curt and chilling as ever (“RIP, you can’t son me/My pop’s dead,” he deadpans on “My Era”), even when his writing treads well-worn ground. There were seams to tighten and holes to fill, but Havoc and Alchemist handle his vocals with care. Most importantly, Havoc and Prodigy’s chemistry remains intact. Neither has ever been a particularly showy writer or lyrical gymnast—their respective appeal comes from their pugilist directness and the way their personalities stayed burrowed deep in the cement of LeFrak City, no matter how high their stars ascended. In this sense, “Mr. Magik” gets the closest to vintage Mobb Deep, particularly when the two trade the mic every few bars to go in on their enemies while dodging CIA agents and laying up with mistresses. The same could be said for the shuffling “Easy Bruh,” anchored by a drumbreak, faint keys, sirens, and the tightest Prodigy raps on the whole album (“Niggas mad? Put a cape on ’em/Now they super mad” got a good laugh out of me). At its best, Infinite feels effortless in a way Mobb Deep hasn’t for years, the pair comfortable in their older, wearier skin.

October 8, 2025 0 comments

Lifestyle

Billionaires’ Bunker Review: A Stylish Survival Drama That’s Flawed But Fascinating | Glamsham.com

by jummy84 October 8, 2025

written by jummy84

Billionaires’ Bunker arrived on Netflix with quiet confidence, carrying the signature tension and spectacle viewers expect from Spanish thrillers. The premise is both dark and addictive: a group of ultra-rich families retreat underground to survive what they believe is a global apocalypse. What unfolds inside that bunker is a mix of privilege, paranoia, and power games that slowly unravel into something much more complex.

The show follows Max, a man just out of prison who suddenly finds himself dragged into his family’s luxurious underground shelter, the Kimera bunker. As he adjusts to life in this sealed world, it becomes clear that not everyone is there for survival. Secrets emerge, loyalties fracture, and questions about the world above start to haunt everyone inside.

What Works:

Fans online agree that worldbuilding is one of the show’s biggest strengths. The bunker looks stunning yet suffocating, perfectly capturing the sense of safety that feels like a trap. Many viewers have called it “one of the best-looking Netflix shows this year,” appreciating how the atmosphere feels both cinematic and claustrophobic.

Another thing people love is how the story plays with morality. Viewers have praised how it doesn’t stick to a simple good-versus-evil narrative. Instead, it shows how fear, greed, and guilt blur everything. The interactions between Max and Asia are also a highlight for many fans. Their tension-filled chemistry gives the story a human core in a world driven by secrets and survival.

The ending has become one of the most-discussed parts of the show. Fans have been posting theories about what really happened above ground and whether the supposed apocalypse was ever real. Some call it one of Netflix’s smarter twists in recent months.

Where It Misses?
Despite its visual appeal and tension, Billionaires’ Bunker isn’t perfect. Viewers have pointed out that the middle episodes drag. Several Reddit threads describe the pacing as “slow and repetitive,” especially around episodes four to six. Others say it feels like “too much conversation, not enough revelation.”
Another common complaint is that some characters feel flat. Audiences mention that while the main cast holds attention, the supporting characters blend into the background without clear motivation. A few users compared it to Money Heist, saying it has “the same energy, but without the spark.”
A number of fans also criticized the tone for being uneven. Some episodes feel like a high-stakes thriller, while others slip into soap-style melodrama. There are even moments where the emotional beats don’t hit the way they should. Still, most viewers agree that the finale pulls things back together in a satisfying way.
Final Thoughts:
Billionaires’ Bunker is the kind of series that grows on you. It’s flawed, yes, but also oddly captivating. The setting alone makes it worth watching, and even when the story feels stretched, it holds your curiosity. What keeps it interesting is how it uses a survival setup to say something about wealth, truth, and human nature.
It’s not a perfect show, but it’s definitely not a bad one. Fans are right when they call it “a beautiful mess.” It’s the kind of series that keeps you watching, not because it’s flawless, but because it’s unpredictable and strangely magnetic.
For me, Billionaires’ Bunker earns a 3.5 out of 5. It’s a solid weekend watch with enough mystery, tension, and emotional moments to keep you thinking even after it ends.

October 8, 2025 0 comments

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