Heed this warning! This article is not impartial. It’s biased. You see, I wouldn’t say, "I’m a Damon Albarn fan"; I’d say, "I’m a sucker for him." Any review of mine covering the new Gorillaz album, Plastic Beach, will...
It was bound to happen eventually. Over the last decade or so, each of the finest purveyors of laid back, easy-to-like vaguely folk-ish Top 40 fare (like Dave Matthews, Donovan Frankenreiter and Jack Johnson – there are more) has done at least a short stretch...
Another surprise visit from Don Loder. This instalment of your regularly-issued SWAG Report is a bit different – not all of the songs I'm totin' are brand spankin' new. “Why Don?” You're askin', “Why are you unloading a...
It has been said by several philosophers that guilt and the resulting sadness of it is a woman's burden to bear in this life. It may be felt by men, but men will bull their way through and try to ignore it (with mixed results); women contemplate and sometimes...
If you've ever had a buzz from drinking right at the same time you're beginning to catch trails from that hit of acid that some well-meaning woman threw coyly into your mouth at a party, you know that magic midpoint between the world as everyone knows it and...
In listening to Women + Country, the first thought that leaps to mind is, “Wow – like father, like son.” After over a decade spent breaking into pop music with the Wallflowers and then continuing along a similar path with a distinctly more...
Since the collapse of mainstream metal happened around 1991, few bands have been more violently abused than Ratt, but there's a good reason for that: after Nirvana broke and the wheels fell off of the high times for bands like Motley Crue, Van Halen, Guns N'...
Some bands are just impossible to pigeonhole. Like, how often do you say that something sounds as aggressive and technically complex as metal but comes off feeling an awful lot like hardcore because, on a subject level, the songs are also as personal and self-reflexive...
How does one try to explain a sound that is equal parts biting self-examination and sugary pop, but laced with arena-ready rock? Rock candy? Saccharine singer-songwriter? Sweet Depression? It's hard to pick just one but, on The Army You Got, AfterpartY already has...
Thirteen years ago, Bettie Serveert reigned supreme over the subway that runs beneath the underground. How'd they pull it off? By playing hard-to-get with both fans and the music industry at large; they only toured sporadically in any given region, they released...