A couple weeks ago, I saw Tori Amos in a nice, sit-down venue here in Denver. Nearly as notable as the extremely good performance was the people-watching: the general crowd vibe can only be described as Lilith Fair-ass. Particularly the universally goateed dudes sprinkled through the crowd.

The first time I saw Circuit des Yeux, she was howling and writhing all over the stage in a small Irish pub in Raleigh. It was completely disruptive to the otherwise tranquil Friday night scene, and one of the more impressive shows that I had seen in some time.

I was about to write about this album, one of my all-time favorites, when I realized that I already had, just about a year ago when I first started expanding from interviews to essays. I was pleased to see that I was worse at it then than I am now; I hope this piece's archival/anthropological value outweighs the slight quality dropoff..

You know that movie trope where a character experiences some sort of dissociation or great trauma, expressed through a slow-motion shot of them walking among a crowd with either silence or totally indiscernible sound? A bit like this. Walking around listening to Phantom Brickworks is a guaranteed shortcut to that sensation. The loops, slow and ambient as hell, are at once massively spacious and just present enough to drown out any outside stimuli.

I'd semi-intentionally avoided the last several Tyler, the Creator albums, but people have been so over the moon about this that I had to check it out. A negative: Tyler's voice and delivery are so distinctive that it's virtually impossible to separate this from his prior work (a problem if you haven't been a diehard throughout). A positive: this thing is legitimately good.

Many of my King Krule thoughts made it into the only TMT review that I've been fully satisfied with, but the lad simply won't stop releasing music. I wasn't sure that I was ready to write about this, but I just walked home in an awful mix of wind and light snow and it has suddenly become quite relatable. King Krule's is a sound that evokes a very specific unease, one which may very well exist only in his own mind, colored by whatever wretched filter exists between him and the rest of the world.