While it was never really addressed at the time of its release, Era Vulgaris was a very problematic album for Queens Of The Stone Age. At the time of that album's making, the record-buying public was snapping up everything it could find with Josh Homme's name on or associated with it and calling it all genius. The storm of approval was spectacular and thick and a lot of Queens' early work was deserving of such praise but, when Era Vulgaris...

To be perfectly frank, country music has only suffered from one problem for the last forty years: a massive inferiority complex. For the last forty years, Country has continually grabbed for the brass ring that Pop music wears, and tried to succor some of the genre's listeners away by trying to play by pop's rules with thoroughly mixed results. In the Seventies and early Eighties, country tried to employ the cartoonishly large disco instrumental arrangements of the day to get...

Most regularly, people look at the largest visible moments in a band's career and assume that those are the explosive instances which define all the successes that said band has enjoyed, but that isn't always true. If one were to look at Rise Against, for example, they'd see 2004's Siren Song of the Counter Culture as being the moment when all of the elements aligned and the band just exploded into the world's popular consciousness. There is validity in that...

When does a band finally get to stand outside the shadow of its own past? That is the first question those who listen to The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here will ask themselves in frustration, because Alice In Chains appears right back where they were when Black Gives Way To Blue came out in most listeners' mind's eye; facing a wall of dubious expectation. Listeners will find themselves asking if singer William DuVall can stand up to Layne Staley's legacy (just...

Of Monsters And Men are certainly wearing their newfound fame and attention well. Formed just three years ago, the folk-flavored quintet charged out of Iceland like a force of nature and has captivated audiences with the beautiful, stunning and soulful vocal interplay of multi-instrumentalists Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir, Ragnar Þórhallsson, Brynjar Leifsson, Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson and Kristján Páll Kristjánsson and their intricate, folky charms as well. The innate accessibility of...

As news of Ray Manzarek's death floated across the internet (including the bizarre, beyond post-modern moment when the story that his death was really an internet hoax turned out to be an internet hoax in itself), I was struck by a couple of recurring threads in my friends' Facebook posts. Of course, there were the inevitable video clips of the Doors, including a few which actually featured Manzarek as much as the other dead Door. There were also, just as...

If there's one performer destined to go the route of showtune slingin' cheesedick mediocrity in his golden years, it's Rod Stewart. Even at his commercial zenith, around the time of Blondes Have More Fun and "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy," The Mod had already cashed in any vestiges of credibility and masculinity along with, more importantly, the will to muster half a concern over the loss. Having held out on the Faces with his A-list oeuvre at the dawning of his...

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Then she leaves with someone you don't know.But she made sure you saw hershe looks right at you and bolts.…And your friends say, "What is it?You look like you've seen a ghost." They played the first Airborne Toxic Event CD regularly at my work and, even through a crappy sound system and the chaotic din of retail, those lines reached out and grabbed me. It wasn't just the punch of the lines themselves, it was the strings sawing away behind...

What do you say about a record which (at least occasionally) makes you cringe and recoil because some of the sounds on it are just so abhorrent, but it isn't so bad that the idea of listening to it doesn't always make you die a little inside? How does one say, “This record is bad, but not so bad that it's impossible to make one's way all the way through it?” How does one explain that, somehow, a record manages...