I’ve been on a Bruce Springsteen kick recently (I think I could write a two-thousand word analysis on Rosalita alone), but occasionallyI need something more mindless and disposable. My recent pop album of choice has been Taylor Swift’s Speak Now, which has risen considerably in my esteem the past few weeks. It has a lot…
Welcome to the teens! The aughties have reached their end and all of us who smugly ignored 2000 and celebrated the new millennium as 2001 rolled in are psyched about the new decade. Why? Because a new decade means that it’s prime time for retrospectives on the last decade! So, just in time for the…
A thoughtful summary of several of the best 3rd wave ska songs around.
I have a confession to make, and that is — despite my love of movies and music and television and books and video games and the like — I tend not to be very up to date on my media consumption. There’s simply too much for me to pay attention to, and it usually costs…
Goodness knows there are more active musical artists today than there were thirty years ago – or five years ago, or yesterday. Just like the global population, the “band population” has a birth rate that exceeds its mortality rate. (Don’t ask for an analogue for shifting line-ups or new group formation – it gets gruesome.)…
“Silence is the enemy.” At some point on this past August 11th, at Jiffy Lube Pavilion in Virginia, it all went away. At some indefinable moment, while realizing that time had seemed to stop as Green Day obliterated tedium on their way through a legendary, two-hour-and-45-minute show, while observing that Billie Joe Armstrong is a…
Boys Like Girls (2006) – 2.5 stars Love Drunk (2009) – 4 stars In the mid-to-late 00s, Boys Like Girls have piggybacked onto the pop-emo scene trail-blazed by bands like the (more talented) All-American Rejects. Their genre, emo, has now almost completely abandoned its intense, uncompromising Rites of Spring roots, now coming to rest somewhere in that spectrum between Jimmy…
Rating: 3 and a half stars (out of 5) Neon Trees opened for The Killers in 2008, inviting a natural comparison to a band they clearly respect. A couple years later, the Trees are playing a gig at the upcoming Lollapalooza concerts, their lead single “Animal” gets some radio play, and…they’re also plugging Las Vegas…
Arcade Fire, EP (2003) – 2 stars Funeral (2004) – 4.5 stars Neon Bible (2007) – 4.5 stars Within seemingly 5 minutes of breaking onto the music scene, the Arcade Fire lost anonymity. David Bowie immediately proclaimed himself a major fan, festivals like Lollapalooza snapped them up, and U2 not only asked them to share…
Americans today don’t give a hoot about progressive rock. Our parents grew up on Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd; the lucky ones collected vinyl from Kansas, ELP, and King Crimson. Those heirlooms have clearly not trickled down yet here the way they have in experimental music havens scattered around Japan and Northern and Western Europe.…