Okay, all you hipsters, you need this CD. Throw a few of these cuts on your next “Party Playlist” and you can impress everyone with your appreciation of the hippest jazz and your ironic attitude towards classic rock. Or vice versa, if you prefer. Either way, you’ll earn plenty of WTF points. Jetsetter Jazz melds jazz standards with the biggest rock hits. For the most part, they take familiar jazz riffs and superimpose a well-known rock melody and lyrics on...
I’m a radio girl in my car. Not by choice, it just seems that things like rent, food and gas have a higher level of importance than something like an iPod which I’ve never had the pleasure of owning. I got my used car almost two years ago now and thought I’d keep my kids quiet by inserting a kids CD into the player; to my dismay, it got stuck. For the same reason I don’t own an iPod, I...
The perfect irony of working in the music press is that, while it is a news-based medium, the things which get reported are rarely the newest things happening in a subject's life. In many ways, being a rock writer is as much (if not more) a pop medium as pop music is in that the focus always treads to the popular interest of the moment. not the biggest possible story hinted at or even the one which is of the...
For fear of stating the pitifully self-evident, twenty years is a long damned time. Twenty years is 7300 days. Twenty years is 175, 200 hours. Twenty years is innumerable miles spent in the back of a van on tour, a ridiculous number of cigarettes, enough broken guitar strings to support a bridge (if they're woven together properly) and a slightly smaller but no less significant number of bass strings and/or drum heads. The number of lost or broken guitar picks...
Slash is back with another stab at a solo album. Yes, the man is a rock legend and has managed to stay at the forefront of the rock world decades after his golden era. It's good to see the guy's still at it, if for no other reason than because we'll get to hear some Guns N' Roses tunes whenever he plays live. Of course, most who pick up Apocalyptic Love are going to be hoping for some sort of...
It has often been said that, of everyone currently making music anywhere on the pop spectrum, Bjork is the artist possessed of the ability to compose and produce music which is breathtaking in its delicacy and startling clarity. It's true, of course; Bjork has produced some very fine work but, with the release of Bloom, she may not go unrivaled in style or stature for much longer if Beach House has anything to say about it. On Bloom (the band's...
It's funny how, as profound and thought-provoking as different art forms can be, it doesn't take a lot of effort for some uninspired hack to take the basic the basic principles of a form and create a perfectly hollow mockery of the genuine article. Decades ago, that was exactly the thing which happened within the Fluxus art movement; known for blending different artistic media and disciplines, Fluxus could actually be very bold and thought-provoking in its simplistic construct, but it...