For fans of: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon / Microphones in 200X

(BOOK VERSION IN STOCK TOO)

What they're saying: Upon the digital release of the record, Stereogum named the record their album of the week, with writer Chris Deville praising it as such: “Microphones In 2020 is a rapturous, devastating creative work, one that sent my mind and heart reeling.” And Quinn Moreland at Pitchfork narrows in on what the album truly is; “a 45-minute song about many things, including artmaking, self-mythologizing, and what it means to bear witness to one’s own existence and transformations.”

What we say: First off, this has the mood and feel of the classic recordings of the Microphones, which would be enough to get our attention on its own. But this record is also an amazingly successful experiment in conceptual songwriting. Exceptionally engaging for a 40+ minute song, its self-referential, literally narrative, direct, obsessively detailed, and emotionally affecting. One of the few ever cases I can think of where an artist tells their own story in song, I suppose the Minutemen did too. Microphones In 2020 is cut from the same cloth as 2017’s A Crow Looked At Me (as Mount Eerie), but instead of confronting death, it confronts the artist’s own genesis.