Mark Josephson, Executive Director of the New Music Seminar said back in 1988 that “alternative music has real strength, real quality, real excitement, and it has to be socially significant, as opposed to Whitney Houston, which is pablum.” That’s a great explanation of what started during the late-‘70s to early-‘80s as college radio features like Dead Kennedys… Read more
Photo Credit: Live Nation Depending on who you ask, Colson Baker – AKA Machine Gun Kelly – is either pop-punk’s savior or the man holding the tickets to its downfall. Despite what his detractors would have you believe, Baker’s take on pop-punk is no worse than most others who have revived the sound for the… Read more
Photo Credit: Atlantic Records This is the album Charlotte Aitchison – you probably know her better as Charli XCX – should have made at the beginning of her career, back when she was still a pop star on the rise releasing albums such as True Romance and co-writing platinum-selling mega-hits like Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and… Read more
Photo Credit: Maria José Govea Something important happened in the last 2-3 years – well, besides the pandemic, climate change, and never-ending political turmoil -: the standard for mainstream music increased exponentially. Chalk it up to “Bad Guy” or “Old Town Road” – songs that paved a weirder and wilder path for Top 40 music… Read more
Photo Credit: EMP Media/Halfheart Media Though you wouldn’t guess it from a casual listen, there’s something remarkably ambitious about the second album of Said The Sky – the musical project of Coloradan Trevor Christensen. Like the best albums of our time – take Fetch The Bolt Cutters and Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, for two recent examples – Sentiment attempts… Read more
You can’t judge a book by the cover, except when you can. Look at these guys: Photo Credit: Zack Smith You KNOW what these guys sound like before you hear a note. If you’ve spent any time in New Orleans, and I do not mean Mardi Gras Bourbon Street, you know that it is a… Read more
Photo Credit: DTA Records While Avril Lavigne’s new single unmistakably sounds like one of hers in nearly every way – the angsty-but-somehow cute vocals, punk-with-a-pop-hook melody, and even the title (“Bite Me”), it also contains one of the most confounding and funny lyrics in a rock radio hit in quite some time. “Hey you, you should… Read more
Punk rock changed my life. But if you meet anyone as knee-deep into middle age as I am, who spent a good deal of their youth in dodgy bars and clubs, they are going to say the same thing; same words, same tone, same look on their faces. I can smell it on people like… Read more
Photo Credit: Lupe Bustos “I’m living in your letters // Breathe deeply from this envelope // It smells like you and I can’t be without that scent.” Its lyrics like these that made Dashboard Confessional’s 2000 debut The Swiss Army Romance such a seminal, incisive record – one whose ability to capture the seismic pain of young heartbreak… Read more
Photo Credit: Frank Ockenfels The opening cut from Tear for Fears’ first album of all-new material in seventeen years, The Tipping Point, has already secured a place among the best songs released in 2022. The appropriately-titled “No Small Thing” is absolutely incredible, starting as ’70s folk-rock a la Cat Stevens before an echo-drum beat kicks in and… Read more