There’s Chinese writing on the cover of the new Blur album, and when you open the liner notes to uncover any further mummified Blur truths, it looks for a second like everything’s going to be Chinese. This is trivial, and also noteworthy, depending on how you look at it. First of all, allow me to […]
Success, when wielded properly, gets people opening their mouths and nodding a little bit, saying, “Oh, yeah!” It can be politics, it can be art, or sometimes it can just be a sunny day. But it’s a delicate process. You can’t have too much of any one thing. And in this, lies sacrifice. But it […]
Around the time the closeur on Everclear’s So Much for the Afterglow “Like a California King” faded out, I think, rock music lost its visceral focus. A lot of this is understandable, I guess, with things turning to rap, and the nation’s siege under the 9/11 attacks. It seems, though, that for a while, the […]
Which came first, the goose or the gander — the sense of humor or the persona? My first impression upon spinning disc 1 of Sukierae, the two-disc solo collection of Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy (just “Tweedy” here), was wow, it’s punk, this guy likes punk. Not to say Wilco necessarily became the “anti-punk” in their years […]
For whatever reason, Pearl Jam, in their theoretically tenuous post-Binaural days, seem bent on making records The Offspring should be making. As a joke, a few days ago, I wrote on Facebook, “Yo, Ed Vedder, you gotta hook up Lightning Bolt for free.” And in fact, I half expected to actually get it. I wouldn’t […]
It’s very ironic, or should I say unexpected, that “discourse” is an operative word in the canny discussion of this new Julia Holter album. Discourse, which has many definitions but, in summation, means an exchange of ideas or capacity for thought, in music, vaguely implies lack of genre. Now, if you’re from the Gang of […]
My favorite album of this year comes from what has already been my favorite band for more than five years. This is obviously a point of disappointment, semantically speaking. I mean, I feel like some gushy teenage Foo Fighters fan. Along these lines, Stitches is the most “rock” album to date to have come from […]