Meet the Staff!

Introduction
South Loop Records is a very new review page created by me (Aleks). I wrote a couple of reviews before deciding to add my friend Graham as a writer and editor. The goal that Graham and I have with this page is to have fun reviewing a wide variety of music and to give you guys recommendations! So, before we continue on into the next chapter of this page, I thought that we should both introduce ourselves. Here's a little bit about ourselves!

Aleks
Hey! My name is Aleks and I'm based out of Chicago. I'm a music buff who's interested in all sorts of genres including shoe gaze, post rock, jazz, and more. I have a record collection I'm building up and I might flaunt it sometimes on here. I got into music early in my childhood via my dad. Most of my early music taste was due to him and so I was a pretty cultured kid growing up and I'm definitely grateful for that. Outside of music I enjoy playing video games, running, and skateboarding. Some of my favorite albums are "Bryter Layter" by Nick Drake, "Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada" by Godspeed, "Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts" by M83, and "Delaware" by Drop Nineteen. I'm always taking music recommendations so feel free to email me! 

Graham
Hello! My name is Graham, based out of usually either my home in Chicago or my school in Connecticut. My interests include rowing, acting, and especially listening to and playing music. Growing up, my parents had me constantly listening to country and folk music my whole life, so those genres are permanently ingrained into my personal taste. But I also try to listen to as many different types of music as possible. I love jazz, metal, hyperpop, pop, etc. If the music's good, I’ll listen to it. And honestly sometimes some less than great music too. Some of my favorite albums are Sublime’s ‘40 oz. To Freedom,’ ‘Ants from Up There' by Black Country, New Road, ‘I Love My Computer’ by Ninajirachi, and Chet Baker’s albums ‘It Could Happen to You’ and ‘Misty.’ Always taking recs music recs!

Bryter Layter - Nick Drake

 Bryter Layter - Nick Drake; Review

Bryter Layter is Nick Drake at his most quietly devastating, an album that somehow feels both intimate and cinematic, like a late-night conversation happening inside a cathedral. Released in 1971 to near-total commercial indifference, it is one of the great injustices of popular music history that this record did not find its audience in Drake's own lifetime, because what he achieved here is nothing short of extraordinary. It is an album that rewards patience, that asks you to slow down and meet it on its own terms, and when you do, it opens up into something vast and luminous and deeply human.

Drake's guitar playing alone would be enough to make the record remarkable. His fingerpicking style is so precise and so entirely his own that it resists comparison to almost anyone else. There is a conversational quality to the way his right hand moves across the strings, every note landing exactly where it needs to. However, what elevates Bryter Layter above even his other work is the production. Led by Robert Kirby and Joe Boyd, and the contributions of arranger John Cale, whose string and keyboard textures give the album a lush almost baroque grandeur that somehow never overwhelms the fragility sitting at its center. The orchestration breathes alongside Drake rather than competing with him, filling in the emotional space around his voice without ever crowding it.

Drake's singing is never showy, it is low and close, almost conversational and yet it carries an emotional weight that is genuinely hard to account for. There is a quality to it that feels like confession, like you are hearing something you were not entirely meant to hear. On Hazey Jane I he sounds almost heartbreakingly tender, while Hazey Jane II opens with a burst of energy that is as close to euphoric as Drake ever got on record. The brass arrangement lifts the track into something bright and almost celebratory. Northern Sky is perhaps the album's crown jewel. It’s a love song so open and unguarded that it feels almost too beautiful to look at directly. Cale's organ floats underneath Drake's guitar beautifully and adds a personal touch to the track.

What makes the album especially extraordinary is the tension running through its entire length. There is real joy here, genuine warmth and even playfulness, but always with a shadow just underneath. A persistent sense that the person singing is observing happiness from a slight distance rather than fully inhabiting it. It is not a sad album exactly, but it is a wistful one. That emotional ambiguity is what gives Bryter Layter its lasting power. It does not tell you how to feel; it simply creates an atmosphere so fully realized that your own feelings rush in to fill it.

Decades on, the album has only grown in stature. Bryter Layter is the kind of record that doesn't just hold up but actually deepens with every listen, revealing new emotional textures and small details you somehow missed. It is music that seems to know something about longing and beauty and the passage of time that most artists spend entire careers reaching for. 

Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada E.P. - Review

Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada E.P. - Godspeed You! Black Emperor; Review

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There are records that document a moment, and then there are records that become the moment. Records that dissolve the boundary between sound and feeling so completely that you can't remember what silence felt like before you heard them. Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada, released in 1999 on Constellation Records, is twenty-eight minutes long and contains exactly two tracks. It is, without question, one of the most devastating and perfect pieces of music ever committed to tape. By 1999 the Montreal collective had already announced themselves with the sprawling, monolithic F♯ A♯ ∞, but Slow Riot is where they shed any remaining restraint and made something that felt less like an album and more like a transmission. A distress signal fired from the ruins of the twentieth century's promises.

Moya

The first track "Moya" opens with strings, haunting and post-apocalyptic. Sophie Trudeau's violin enters first, alone and unhurried, tracing a melody so quietly aching that it feels less composed than discovered. It's one of the most disarming openings in the band's catalogue: no drones, no noise, no buildup. Just melody, naked and exposed. When the guitars and rhythm section do enter, they do so with great care, treating the melodic foundation Trudeau has laid like something fragile. The piece builds slowly, almost tenderly, cycling through a figure that suggests both lullaby and elegy simultaneously. For the first half, "Moya" is gentle, but it quickly intensifies. The crescendo, when it comes, is one of the greatest moments in post-rock or maybe even music in general. The piece swells into this crazy post-rock anthem that sweeps you off your feet. It then slowly recedes, the music slowly coming to an end. Not with resolution but with exhaustion. The guitars unwind, the sound thinning back to near-silence.

BBF3

Named after its unlikely protagonist Blaise Bailey Finnegan III, a man the band encountered and recorded on a Montreal street corner, "BBF3" opens not with music but with his voice. His rambling, barely-coherent monologue about rights, grievances and dispossession plays out over the opening minutes like a field recording. The dialogue is sad but funny at the same time. Then the music assembles itself around him, and it is spectral from the start: guitars that buzz and drone like power lines in winter, an atmosphere of industrial desolation conjured without a single conventional riff or chord change. The rhythm section is sparse here, skeletal, giving the piece an openness that feels less like space and more like exposure. The climax is more violent than the peak of "Moya," and more dissonant. The guitars here are not soaring but rather howling, grating against each other in a way that feels genuinely angry, genuinely broken. You are in the riot, the world is falling apart around you. It's the sound of something that wants to be beautiful being denied it. And then, as with "Moya," it subsides, leaving behind only the faintest residue of its own grief. Blaise's voice resurfaces in the dying moments, the frame closing on itself, the whole piece returning to the man it began with.

In conclusion, Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada is an EP about what falls through the cracks of society. Blaise Bailey Finnegan III is its unlikely protagonist and Godspeed treats him with profound respect. Not as a punchline or a symbol, but as a human being whose particular disorder reflects something systemic and shared. The music that surrounds and grows from his recorded voice is some of the most emotionally precise and structurally brilliant the band ever produced, evoking feelings you might not have encountered before.

Truly, a masterpiece.

10/10