As most people who came of age in the Seventies and Eighties can (and will) tell you, Todd Rundgren's impact on pop music is near-incalculable. Both with The Nazz and as a solo artist, Rundgren co-wrote and recorded some of the great rock standards which...
Those patently foolish idealists under the mistaken impression that great music always gets noticed by the record-buying public need to go out and find a copy of The Pink Album by the Avengers. Since its original release in 1983 (four years after the band broke up),...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
Remember the first time you heard The Cure or Depeche Mode? It was awesome, wasn't it? The tremendous impact those moments had could have been for any number of reasons – maybe you were unhappy, or maybe you were sick of New Wave seeming to represent the...