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I love this album because I feel like the way it engages with Blackness and sound is phenomenal. Especially the way Down With the Clique begins? Sometimes I appreciate being able to listen to music and formulate your own interpretation of what you hear. I find when I am listening to the beginning of Down With the Clique I am Alice descending down a rabbit hole. I know the album starts with Things I imagined but DWTC is really the beginning for me! I appreciate the use of interludes & non singing within this album and it really lets me know that this is a sequenced piece of work! It helps to curate an atmosphere and makes me think about what Home means for Solange and whether or not she’s referring to an artistic practice that is released from the confines of capitalism? I mean in Binz she does relish in waking up in luxury so not all the way but I do think her engagement sonically is really unique. What does it mean to imagine home as an artistic practice & one that doesn’t relate rest & safety to capitalist manifestations of luxury? Almeda & Binz are both pieces that definitely complicate my relationship to the album
Jan 24, 2025
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Rarely am I so captivated with such an odd album. Here's my review:
Like some Star Wars fans think you should watch the movies out of order for the best storytelling of the overarching canon, I have a proposal for you before you dig into this baddie.
Start at the title track "Supermarket Woman", Track 9. One condition to proceed past this song is that you have to like it. If you don't like Track 9, then just don't bother with the rest of the album and save yourself an hour.
Now for the rest of you that are onboard, go from Track 9.
Best put by a friend, "it sounds like they told ai to make an album that sounds like 1950s commercialism and island music had a baby". I'd go to add that this supposed AI was a fan of Wesley Willis, too.
From this dystopian lo-fi bop (bop used sparingly in my dictionary) to the top of the album is like the whiplash from a double-shot of whiskey directly into snorting a line of blow...if whiskey was a liminal space fever-dream and the cocaine were the Balearic Islands.
You might also find yourself in the downtempo post-post-punk boogie woogie you dreamt of DJing for your one (1) friend that would tolerate it and the four (4) other bystanders hanging out at the record shop at 2pm on a Friday.
After a Spanish influence brings us into the first two songs of the album, we pivot into a dance track at Track 3, "9 Moons" (a remix release was put out as well), and onward through a gentle, rhythmic and interesting ride down to the "Lambrusco Party" (Track 5).
My energy keeping consistent, yet meditative, "Six Am" (Track 6) is exactly how I want to wake up after a molly bender on a pale-sand beach. It would motivate anyone for a mushroom-spinach omelette after a night like that.
I sank into Tracks 7 & 8, understanding the definition of an album-cut here, desperately edging on the story arc of how-in-the-fuck we get back to Track 9 through this album's story. I need a snack.
Like a cold-handed caress after a slap to the face, Track 10 & 11 wind me back down.
"In a State" (Track 12); Thom Yorke as fuck. What can't Lemonade Market do?
The proverbial needle hits the proverbial run-out groove on this record and it has me longing with questions in the music's absence. Questions about who these three white figures on the album cover are, where the chairs in which they're sitting were photographed, and why on god's green earth they used that font along the bottom.
Album Rating: 10/10
Feb 14, 2024
only album that is BOTH a contender for my 2023 and 2024 albums of the year. truly beautiful and cohesive work by the wonderful underscores! me and my roommate really bonded over our love for this album and went to an underscores show early on in our friendship and it was a cathartic experience. small venue, songs interluded and introduced with early playstationesque animated clips on a projector screen behind the stage, a singular light bulb dangling above the crowd that flickered with the music during slower songs. the directors cut adds 4 songs but holy mackerel each is beautiful and chaotic in its own right. relistening to the whole thing while i clean my apartment and having a grand time
Feb 28, 2025
pulldrone ambient is soooo in for 2025!! i didn’t expect this album to emotionally touch me as much as it did, but, especially the last three songs, i find myself coming back to. it feels like the sound of becoming and change somehow, although i don’t know what it’s about. i think a lot of her stuff is quite self-determinable though, so im trying to find as much beauty in this one as possible..
Jan 15, 2025
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Down With the Clique - Solange
Jan 24, 2025
Jan 24, 2025