Since 2006, producer/musician Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton has regularly described himself as being less a producer of music and more an “auteur” and patron for music like a director is for film. He has said, “I want to create a director's role in music… I have to be in control of the project I'm doing. I can create different kinds of musical worlds, but the artist needs the desire to go into that world…. Musically, there is no one who...
It took a while (longer than anyone expected, actually) for the trends in rock to start shifting away from the guitar-pop masquerading as “indie rock” which has held the popular imagination of the record-buying public for the last couple of years, but it seems to finally be happening now, as the bands begins to go their separate ways. Both The New Pornographers and Broken Social Scene have already broken stride with their “indie rock” beginnings as both Forgiveness Rock Record...
Alright real quick, So tell me if you think I'm wrong – some things are just too good to pass up ain't they? I found some stuff like that for you this week kiddies, and it's just awesome. Somehow, I found a bunch o' solid gold SWAG to lay on you, and it ain't gonna cost you nothin'! You think I'm lyin'? See for yourself – I got my hands on a copy of Peter Gabriel covering some classic Tom...
On their first album in twenty years, Devo doesn't do anything new, but they do their 'same old' thing better than they have in an even longer time. As they say in “What We Do,” “What we do is what we do/ It's all the same, there's nothing new.” Nonetheless, the result is, as the opening track declares, “So fresh!” The rhythms are tight and propulsive, the tunes are infectiously catchy, and the cultural satire is still sharp (even if,...
In every big pop music trend that has appeared over the last fifty years, there have always been a couple of bands who – as deserving as they might have been – just didn't break as big as everyone inside the scene thought they would. Such was exactly the case with Good Riddance; when the band's fantastic Fat Wreck debut hit in 1995, it did so after Green Day, The Offspring and NoFX kicked the doors in on the main...
At a certain point in a band's career, fans cease to expect any significant growth from them. Why? Eventually, the general assumption the public makes is that the band in question has achieved all the goals it set for itself and/or overcome all the boundaries the band members felt compelled to push and are now at a loss for something else to do, so they coast. After fifteen years and six albums, it would be safe to assume that pop-house/electronica...
So, what's a trend-fitting band to do when their trend finally exhausts itself? Does it just curl up its' toes and fade away? Well, sometimes that does happen, but occasionally some of those bands soldier on and even produce something worth hearing. Did anyone really think that band would be Wolf Parade though? When the Montreal-based trio first broke into the mainstream a few years ago, Wolf Parade found themselves playing in a lupine-saturated market; in addition to Wolf Parade,...
Poets working in the rock n' roll idiom are a funny breed. Think about it – more often than not, poetry is an intensely personal art form; a form of expression so personal that if someone other than the author is able to truly understand it, it's because the author digressed enough to let someone else in and understand simply so he/she wouldn't be alone in the feelings that the words conjure. On the other side of the pop culture...
Often when new recording hardware is released on the public, the ideas that many of the items represent are great in theory but limited because some key applications just aren't possible yet. Such was certainly the case with handheld digital recorders for years; since first coming on the open market about seven years ago, digital recorders banked on being the newest exciting thing but didn't offer much beyond that novelty. Early handheld digital recording units were surprising rigid in their...
Some records are possessed of an intangible quality that makes listeners feel like they've come home – there's a comfortable and lived-in feeling that has a warm glow to it. The reigning masters of creating this sort of atmosphere is Soul Asylum – they wear their hearts on their sleeve and inspire listeners to do the same – but other most worthy contenders for the title include Uncle Tupelo, Paul Westerberg, Golden Smog and (to an only slightly lesser degree)...