lower dens takeover

Basically the most important piece of prophecy since Revelations. Nobody has ever thought so deeply and so comprehensively about American civilization, nor written the product of that thinking with such terrifying clarity. -- Jana Hunter, Lower Dens "Romance is coming back, Warren...

This album has really informed my playing and thinking about music recently, specifically the way they take a simple idea and push it and push it until it sort of breaks into something new. I feel connected to the way this album uses punk and pop, desperation and exuberance in an honest way that still feels refreshing to me decades after its creation...

Along with people like Kathy Acker and Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz worked to bring gay culture out of its campy, self-mocking state and turn it into something that could stand beside as opposed to in opposition to straight culture...

We're all running from something, which Becker identifies as death without meaning or legacy. That the source of so much of our culture ought to lie in fear is both sad and eminently forgivable. There's nothing more human than this. Our music tries to sound how it might feel to forgive this essential fault in ourselves and in all of us...

The light of Bowie's stardom often obscures the names of his formidable side people. In this celebrated live show (listen to the full show here) it is impossible to ignore the energy and inventiveness of Carlos Alomar, George Murray and Dennis Davis, the core of the band which helped cement his reputation in the seventies...

Richard Thompson is a remarkably fluid guitar player. His rhythm playing sneaks in lots of passing lines and his solos often contain material from a variety of idioms without sounding forced. His tones change with the times but are always in good taste and unique to him...

These photographers don’t work together, that I know of, but they share a singular ability. Eggleston photographs the minutiae and monotony of our lives in startling color. Goldin is just as deft with her camera, but her subject matter is usually provocative and exhibitionist...

This album fuses the industrial chug of their earlier efforts with a sleeker, brighter sound palette which evokes the aspirational fizz of the eighties so-cal dream to ominous effect. Damon edge as prisoner in a Michael Mann film which never ends...

Escape from Evil, for me, is our most spiritual album, and one of its themes is coming to a place of acceptance of one's own self-perpetuating pain, and finding new tools over the course of life that enables one to do so. This piece held me in its loving arms during a period in which nothing else offered respite, it is a safe space for anyone who cannot sleep...

Together they made albums like U2’s Unforgettable Fire that are the gold standard for tone and economy. That album in particular works as well as it does at least in part because of circumstances of restriction. They were working without a lot of “tools”, according to Lanois, and it made them create something wholly new...