What quality is it that might make a covers album good? They do exist (in fact, 99 Songs Of Revolution: Volume 1 is one of them), but what is it that qualifies one covers record as good and makes another bad? Is it song selection? Is it performance? Is it a combination...
You have to respect a musician who, even with a potentially lucrative “hired gun” job on the go in a world-class band, still feels like he needs to express his own muse, without asking any of the all-star assistance he has access to or otherwise standing on...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...