Photo Credit: Tom Oxley I rarely had so little to say about an album as Oxford band Foals’ seventh album Life Is Yours, so let’s hear what the band has to say about it. “We wanted to write music that would be a forcefield against the darkness, rather than try to proselytize people,” singer Yannis… Read more
Photo Credit: RCA Records Alanis Morissette has been part of the cultural consciousness for some time now. Born in Ontario, Canada in 1974, Alanis was featured on a weekly kid’s show by the ’80s and was a pop star in her native country by the early ’90s. In 1993 Alanis Morrissette dropped an album that… Read more
Photo Credit: Matty Vogel Girlfriends is a musical group composed of Nick Gross, co-owner of Big Noise Records, and solo artist Travis Mills, both of whom are veterans of the MySpace musical period. Upon the death of a good friend and collaborator Lil Peep, Travis Mills made the decision to channel the grief he felt… Read more
Photo Credit: Anton Corbijn As part of the new wave of young heavy metal bands at the start of the ’80s, Sheffield, England’s Def Leppard (whose oldest members at the time were no older than twenty), managed two successful albums mostly through word-of-mouth and touring before releasing Pyromania in 1983, which became not just a massive chart… Read more
Photo Credit: Grant Spanier Having debuted in 2015, it’s just a bit odd that New York City synth-rock outfit’s new album Night Drive is only their second full-length release, so perhaps not surprisingly the band is still relying largely on what they’ve already become known for. Despite its title, the opening cut “The Dark” brings to light… Read more
Photo Credit: Chuck Berry via Universal Attractions (artist management) “Hail, hail rock and roll // Deliver me from the days of old.” – Charles Edward Anderson Berry Rock and roll always had a problem orienting itself from the beginning. It is the musical product of a dozen styles of American music blended through time and… Read more
Photo Credit: Lillie Eiger Harry Styles sees himself as the next great rock legend; he covers classics from the idols he seeks to emulate, and he subverts gender norms by wearing dresses on magazine covers – drawing, for better or for worse, comparisons to the late Kurt Cobain. Styles’ solo debut single “Sign of the… Read more
Photo Credit: Jordan Kelsey Knight Harder Than It Looks is veteran Canadian emo rockers Simple Plan’s first new album of all-new material in six years (it follows 2016’s Taking One for the Team, which in turn was their first new album in five years), and starts with what’s probably the shortest musical psych-out in recent memory: there’s a brief… Read more
Photo Credit: Mikael Eriksson You have to hand it to the Swedes. They have a preternatural ability to craft pop songs, in English, across any genre you could name. This phenomenon began, of course, with Abba who was able to take the disco they heard coming out of the States and turn it into something… Read more
Photo Credit: COIN via Facebook While the pandemic was a time of pause and reflection for most musicians, it marked the most productive moment for Tennessee-based COIN, which has released a steady stream of music across the last two years. Now, on their third album, the band who broke out in 2016 with the song… Read more