Score: 7.5/10 Michael Lane is your new soft rock radio, crooning out majestic, tranquil but aching songs drawing stylistic influence from Mumford & Sons and Bon Iver but always filling the mixes with an anatomical swagger of originality. Lyrically, he does a nice job of shifting topic too, letting existential philosophy and second-person rancor team … Read more“DD Review: Michael Lane – Take it Slow.”
Score: 7/10 “Sea” is a funny word. This is especially true in the case of us Americans, who, as far as I know, don’t have access to anything officially classified as a “sea” anywhere on our contiguous landscape. The very mention of the term, too, seems to imply something grandiose and dramatic, such as mentions … Read more“DD Review: Sea Power – Everything Was Forever.”
Score: 10/10 .. * “You’re short on long-term goals There’s a party there that we oughta go to If you still love rock and roll” – Wilco .. There’s one thing of standing up, doing it and being THAT GUY. There’s another thing of standing up, doing it, being that guy but being YOURSELF in … Read more“DD Review: Spoon – Lucifer on the Sofa.”
Score: 8/10 Korn is still rocking albums out and you know what? You get down with your bad, funky self, Korn. You got a lot of us through some seriously sexually frustrated days in the late ’90s and for that we are eternally grateful. It’s pretty much always a spirited occasion hearing from you. I … Read more“DD Review: Korn – Requiem.”
Score: 10/10 Typically, there are four different ways I get wind of new music releases, to be considered for review on this site. One, and the one that occupies like 98% of the pie graph, or so, is Bandcamp. One percent or so is The Fire Note, a half a percent or so is accounted … Read more“DD Review: Liars – The Apple Drop.”
Score: 10/10 One of my first impressions of this new album by Detroit’s blues-rockers The Lucid Furs was seeing this dude on some site list them as a “clone of Led Zeppelin, Blood Ceremony and Blues Brigade,” the person hence of course exhibiting a commendable ability to claim someone to be a clone of many … Read more“DD Review: The Lucid Furs – Da**! That Was Easy.”
Score: 7.5/10 What is the purpose of “dream pop”? You might say, it’s not music for getting anything done to. It’s got no drive, no initiative, no ambition. Well, that is the exact point of the music, in a sense — it’s an escape into a realm that’s purely musical and not ambitious. Pittsburgh’s Flower … Read more“DD Review: Flower Crown – Heat.”
Score: 9/10 With The Vaccines, for me, it’s been all about energy, energy, energy, combined on 2018’s Combat Sports with a newly spiced attention to production that prompted me to rank that best album of the year on this site. In general, they take what you might call a British approach to pop-punk, as the … Read more“DD Review: The Vaccines – Back in Love City.”
Score: 8/10 Go ahead. Try to talk sh** about Jakob Dylan. You know right when he walks in you’ll be palms sweaty, stomach heaving up and down, smiling and glowing, hanging on his every word and waiting to give him your number. Go ahead. Try to call him nepotistic, spoiled, born on third, bland, the … Read more“DD Review: The Wallflowers – Exit Wounds.”
Score: 9/10 Why do I just feel more and more, in the time transpiring these days, that this whole thing is just a charade, that there’s almost zero incentive for making good music in this era? Talib Kweli is hardly a heartwarming point person, at that, on this topic either. So under the paradigm of … Read more“DD Review: Stone Giants – West Coast Love Stories.”