Let it never be said that it doesn't feel good when a plan comes together. When The Headstones reconvened a couple of years ago for a string of concert dates, the band discovered just how much they were missed when venues sold out in advance and the press raved about the solid performances that the band gave up. That first response got the band thinking, but they elected to take small steps, entered the studio and recorded just one song,...
Before preparing this review, I revisited Hayden's output from 2001's Skyscraper National Park through 2009's The Place Where We Lived and must preface this review by noting that doing so was a huge mistake. In itself, Us Alone is a good listen; it provides much of the Leonard Cohen-meets-Neil Young qualities and careful songwriting that have defined Hayden's past work. The problem is that Us Alone comes up short, literally. To start, there are only eight tracks. Next, several of...
If history has proven anything, it has proven that David Bowie has been most regularly at his best when he's rocking out a grand statement and challenging what his fans expect of him musically. This trend has been the rule for decades; every time Bowie has changed theatrical personae (from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke to the dark artist of music which offered up the Berlin trilogy to the man out of time from the Eighties to the...
You don't expect a sound so perfectly poppy and polite to look like rock's second coming on a live stage, but Imagine Dragons brought exactly that kind of show when they hit the stage at The Warfield Theater in San Francisco on March 16, 2013. They made believers out of those few in the audience before them still questioning if a band without a single aggressive bone in its body could still rock the pants off a capacity crowd. It...
How Music Works is a strange hybrid of a book. It is part musical autobiography, part advice manual for musicians and part philosophical treatise. The amazing thing is that Byrne pulls it off and unites all those elements into a coherent, interesting and entertaining whole. Byrne's overarching thesis is that context influences music. Not just how we hear it, but in fact how it is created; that the type of music one plays is inevitably influenced by the context in...
Remember that girl you knew back in high school who was allegedly a really good guitar player – but no one really knew for sure because she never really played around school and didn't play in a band? Rumors circulated that she was some kind of prodigy, but no one knew for sure because she was really soft spoken and introverted and that one time you asked her to jam with you, she just blushed really brightly before declining the...
Hey junky, Well, I guess I dunnit – I pissed off the gods o' South By Southwest, ann'ey decided ta fight fire wit' napalm; they hit me wit' alla da music I could handle – ann'en some! 'At's right junky, I've got the muthafuckin' muthaload fer youse dis week! It's huge! It's like da gates opened up an' alla da SWAG thit wis hidin' inna dark corners o' da undaground came runnin' through. Ann'I got it all fer youse! Dat's...
Hey junky,Well, I guess I dunnit – I pissed off the gods o' South By Southwest, ann'ey decided ta hit me wit' alla da music I could handle – ann'en some! 'At's right junky, I've got the muthafuckin' muthaload fer youse dis week! It's huge! It's like da gates opened up an' alla da SWAG thit wis hidin' inna dark corners o' da undaground came runnin' through. Ann'I got it all fer youse! Dat's right, ther might be more dis...
Remember back at the dawn of punk, when no one really had a “sound” or a “genre” or a banner to stand under, the artists just had something they wanted to say, an urgent desire to get it out of them and a bad attitude? Some readers certainly do remember but, given that Kate Nash was only born in 1987, there is precisely no way she remembers that time period. By the time she was old enough to start caring,...
Get Up! is an album that had to happen eventually; the question is why did it take so long? It unites two generations of bluesmen (Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite were born twenty-five years apart) and, in the process, demonstrates the universality of the blues idiom. Harper and Musselwhite first worked together in 1997 on a John Lee Hooker recording. It took them this long to find the time to record a full album together but, once they did, they...