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...
It's funny how, as profound and thought-provoking as different art forms can be, it doesn't take a lot of effort for some uninspired hack to take the basic the basic principles of a form and create a perfectly hollow mockery of the genuine article. Decades ago, that was exactly the thing which happened within the Fluxus art movement; known for blending different artistic media and disciplines, Fluxus could actually be very bold and thought-provoking in its simplistic construct, but it...
Remember the first time you heard The Cure or Depeche Mode? It was awesome, wasn't it? The tremendous impact those moments had could have been for any number of reasons – maybe you were unhappy, or maybe you were sick of New Wave seeming to represent the totality of pop at that moment and wanted something which soundd a little more human, or maybe it was because Robert Smith's guitar parts or Dve Gahan's melancholy melodiesjust felt right and had...
Listening to Harrington Saints' new album serves an excellent remainder of how blanched and watered down boot boy street punk has become over he last ten years. Bands like Rancid, Dropkick Murphys and Street Dogs all used to have some punch in their music – a little fight, a little outsider aggression and a little skinhead swing in their streetwise sloganeering – but they've gotten a little soft, pudgy and comfortable over time and have lost some of their stuff....
Everyone's heard the horror stories about up-and-coming bands playing under-populated shows (books like Our Band Could Be Your Life are full of them), but how many people can actually say they went to a concert where no one else showed up? One would assume that moments like that are difficult for a band to take, and Louisville, KY-based hardcore quintet Xerxes proved it certainly isn't easy when they stepped on stage at The Shops at Parts & Labour in Toronto...
Push them hard enough, and every musician will begrudgingly admit that it's possible to call forward potent, powerful and provocative emotional states on command. That's not an easy thing to admit because listeners need that kayfabe to be believable; fans want to believe that the laughter, tears, hopes, fears, aggression and everything else that an artist represents is something that – at east in an abstract way – fans could find within themselves and relate to, and so connect with....
I received this CD eagerly, but also nervously. I have loved Garbage ever since their first, groundbreaking CD, and I’ve been disappointed by them ever since their second one. That first album set the bar so high they haven’t been able to completely clear it since. In fact, it could be said that their first album invented the bar. Garbage had created something new then – studio electronics crossed with hard rock, pop songwriting married to a punk sneer. It...
While he doesn't come right out and say it in conversation (he doesn't seem the type), Hot Water Music bassist Jason Black is finding it difficult to hide his excitement. For the first time eight years, Hot Water Music is back on track with a new record label behind them (Rise Records) and a new album, Exister; the band's first offering of new music since they put out The New What Next in 2004. That's part of what has the...