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: 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
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
With Coronavirus receding and the world slowly opening back up, the last year has allowed musicians to finally get back in the studio and record new music. Combine this with a pandemic’s worth of soul-searching and you find an entire generation of new talent making urgent music that meets this moment. From soul-searching singer-songwriters to… Read more
Photo Credit: Studio 666 / Open Road Films Supernatural horror movies are all about strange and unexplained phenomena, but in the case of the current theatrical release Studio 666, the strange and unexplained start before the film does. First of all, the movie features the band Foo Fighters, and not a brief cameo playing on stage… Read more
Photo Credit: Photo via asitisofficial.com Pop-punk’s resurgence in popularity during the pandemic is one of the more interesting musical trends to have taken place in recent years. It speaks to a few things: chiefly our collective unease and angst, as well as our nostalgia for the not-too-distant past. The genre’s resurgence has seen icons of… Read more
Photo Credit: Polydor Records/Universal Music Group When the word “future” appears in not only a record’s title but in that of three – count ‘em three – of the songs contained therein, it’s probably a safe bet that what we’re about to hear will end up being a concept album with a science fiction theme. That is… Read more
Photo Credit: Haris Nukem Creeper was formed in Southampton, England in 2014. From the beginning, Creeper created a type of rock that could be, and is occasionally, described as horror punk. Now, for me, if you aren’t from Lodi and you don’t have a one-rep max over 250 on the bench, you aren’t a horror… Read more
Photo Credit: Disney+ In 1963, the same year that the Beatles first became a phenomenon in the UK and Europe, Kurt Vonnegut published the novel Cat’s Cradle. In the book, the protagonist ultimately discovers that the founder of the religion that he follows devoutly is, and always was, just a man. This is sort of the feeling… Read more
Photo Credit: Phoebe Fox London musician Holly Humberstone released her first EP Falling Asleep at the Wheel in 2020 and has recently returned with a follow-up EP, The Walls are Way Too Thin. While the artist fits in comfortably with the current wave of deceptively-quiet-but-brutally-honest young female singer-songwriters, Humberstone still manages to carve a niche that is all her… Read more