Welcome to Spin Cycle! Itโs the biweekly aural hygiene you deserve in a handy-dandy cheat sheet format for albums of particular note from Portland and beyond! The Rose City is not unlike a homing beacon for discerning audiophiles, semi-professional appreciators of physical media, and folks who spend three-quarters of their waking lives with headphones fastened […]
Album Review
Album Review: Coastal Conjurings on Derek Hunter Wilsonโs Sculptures
Lindsay Costello
Album Review: Nonbinary Girlfriend Evolves on Sophomore Album IM NOT PRETTYย
Nolan Parker
Album Review: Dissolving the Binary with Dustbunny
Nolan Parker
Album Review: Becoming Friends With Dean Johnson
Audrey Vann
The Mercuryโs Top 10 Portland Albums of 2025
Nolan Parker
Building Community with Portugal. The Man
John Gourley of Portland-based Portugal. The Man has been quietly dropping heat since the mid-2000s, well before the formation of P.TM and the bandโs move from Wasilla, Alaska, down to Rip City. Itโs been all community building of some sort or another: community building with other musicians and creatives, community building between cultures and traditions, […]
Album Review: Puritan Themes, the Second Psych Masterpiece by Holy Sons in 2025
According to the Puritan Themes press release, the albumโs lead single โChain Gang,โ is โan imaginary take on if Cat Stevens had smoked a ton of salvia and taken a much darker route within the world of dense, story-telling songwriting.โย Experiences with salvia can be impactful. Fun trips where textures replicate themselves across various surfaces, […]
Album Review: We’re Heading to the Lake With Portland’s Guitar
In an age where search engine optimization is a vital consideration for news headlines, business upstarts, and pretty much all creative endeavors, youโd be forgiven if you thought that a band called Guitar would drift into eternal, unsearchable obscurity. But ask Guitar brainchild Saia Kuli about the would-be gaffe, itโs the innate humor in such […]
Album Review: The Pastoral Minimalism of Ann Annieโs El Prado
Joan Mitchell made a name for herself in the art world through her large scale paintings featuring gestural, emotionally charged mark making. Working mainly as an abstract-expressionist, her paintings vibrate in her use of color and the movement of brushstrokes across the canvas. Though her paintings appear to be non-objective, as one spends time with […]
Album Review: The Sophisticated Sleaze of Menos el Oso Turns 20
In the mid-2000s, Seattle was exploding with bands pushing genre envelopes: Schoolyard Heroes, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Kay Kay & His Weathered Underground, Mon Frere, Idiot Pilot, These Arms Are Snakes, The Blood Brothers, and so many more.ย Among them were Minus the Bear, a phoenix band rising from the ashes of beloved Seattle hardcore […]
Album Review: Helenโs The Original Faces in the Rearview Mirror
The experimental composer Liz Harrisโbest known as Grouperโis Western Oregonโs resident ghost, conjuring delicate whispers and heavy drones that have haunted the bioregion for two decades. Her work drifts between the otherworldly and the intimate, from acclaimed atmospheres on Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (2008) and Shade (2021) to her electronic collage piece […]
