As he sits and plans out how his next six weeks are going to go, Ryan Dahle can't help but smile. While much of that time period will be spent re-examining his mid-Nineties project Limblifter (he takes great care to make clear that “return” is probably too strong a word), the singer/award-winning record producer is now in a position where (as was most certainly not the case in the Nineties) he doesn't have to hang any hopes or future plans...
Some records are able to grab a listener's attention for the simple reason that they sound exactly nothing like anything else on new release racks at that particular moment. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the catch is that after the album has managed to steal its way in, it has to have something about it which holds the attention of listeners and captures their imagination. that is the part which proves to be a little more difficult to...
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 helped to inspire band's including The Replacements, Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright (and, surprisingly, writers and filmmakers including Nick Hornby and Stephen Frears) – to name only a few. Not only that, his talents as...
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), The Pink Album has appeared on store shelves courtesy of no less than four record labels on a multitude of formats – singer Penelope Houston even did a mail order business selling CDR copies...
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 way, you’ll earn plenty of WTF points. Jetsetter Jazz melds jazz standards with the biggest rock hits. For the most part, they take familiar jazz riffs and superimpose a well-known rock melody and lyrics on...
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 I’d keep my kids quiet by inserting a kids CD into the player; to my dismay, it got stuck. For the same reason I don’t own an iPod, I...
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 is in that the focus always treads to the popular interest of the moment. not the biggest possible story hinted at or even the one which is of the...
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 strings to support a bridge (if they're woven together properly) and a slightly smaller but no less significant number of bass strings and/or drum heads. The number of lost or broken guitar picks...
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 hear some Guns N' Roses tunes whenever he plays live. Of course, most who pick up Apocalyptic Love are going to be hoping for some sort of...
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 produced some very fine work but, with the release of Bloom, she may not go unrivaled in style or stature for much longer if Beach House has anything to say about it. On Bloom (the band's...