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: Oliver Halfin Few bands have mastered the art of still being exciting after 30 years together as a band without beginning to tread water. While there might be flashier, more original, and more forward-thinking groups, Spoon has remained a reliable source of swaggering, Southern-influenced blues-rock. 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, featuring the hit… Read more
Photo Credit: Paige Sara Back in 1999, as we were just on the brink of the new millennium, Jack White seemingly came out of nowhere (actually Detroit) to save rock ‘n’ roll. Or at the very least, strip it down to its basics, as in his band the White Stripes he used only an electric… Read more
Photo Credit: Getty Images for The Recording Academy (All Photos) Award show attendance has been reliably falling year-on-year and this year, the Recording Academy seemed less concerned than ever about doing anything to revert that trend, with an overlong, self-indulgent ceremony that ran for a seemingly never-ending 2 hours and 33 minutes. Beyond making a… Read more
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: Bryan Lasky One thing that’s impossible to deny, for better or worse, is that John Mellencamp’s voice is not what it once was. On his twenty-fourth studio album, Strictly a One-Eyed Jack, the veteran rocker’s singing sound deeper, rougher, and considerably more gravelly (part of this could be just aging, but probably has more… Read more
Photo Credit: Getty Images Before he passed away on January 20th at age seventy-four, singer Michael Lee Aday had never quite been able to successfully quell the common misconception that his stage moniker, Meat Loaf, was the name of a band (within days of his death, the “People also ask… ” feature on Google revealed… Read more
Photo Credit: Mat Hayward/Getty Images Ever since Lana Del Rey had her breakthrough back in 2012 with what some critics described as the “shallow,” “overwrought,” and “depressing” Born to Die, Lana has remained a contemporary pop mystery who rarely appears on TV shows or in interviews. Even though Born to Die would prove some of the most negative… Read more
After the release of her 2017 album Masseduction, Annie “St Vincent” Clark admitted that she had taken the angular sounds that had defined her music up to that point as far as she could. Since bursting onto the scene in 2007 with Marry Me, Clark’s music has progressively become starker and sharper; defined by idiosyncratic arrangements and… Read more
Photo Credit: Emma Viola Lilja Almost immediately after bursting onto the music scene, Britain’s Sam Fender was hailed as the future of rock music; winning the esteemed Brits Critics Choice award – previously awarded to the likes of Adele and Sam Smith. Fender’s full-length debut largely delivered on his early promise; filled with anthemic, timely… Read more