Some sounds are just instantly recognizable. Particularly in pop music, bands rely on those sorts of recognizable, signature sounds to mark or establish themselves; for instance, as soon as a listener hears the monster drums and solid working-class guitars that characterize the licks of “Rock n' Roll,” they know it's Led Zeppelin – know it's Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones playing – and so know what they're getting into. This same phenomenon holds up with Jimi Hendrix' guitar, the...

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 probably just come off as an ode to the former Blur front man. That said, I reached out to the public and got some of the best thoughts I could find on Twitter. It was a collaborative effort on opinion forming,...

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 absorbing and then reproducing their own brand of reggae, and now Xavier Rudd has joined the club. For Koonyum Sun, Rudd has liquidated his beginnings as an uptown folkie, enlisted a crack backing band of...

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 couple of older tunes on us? We might have 'em already. Are you losing your touch at lifting stuff?” Nah, you watch your mouths, you little rodents! Perish the thought! That's never a problem but something interesting is comin' up: In the...

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 agonize over choices made, perceived opportunities missed and the resulting feelings injured to see if they can live with the results. The answer is never exactly a given and may be...

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 the one that materializes when you're utterly out of your mind. It's that moment when you seem to think more clearly than you normally do sober and the urge to quickly take...

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 'folk' bent, Jakob Dylan has jumped ship completely from his pop ark and discovered the joys and delicacy of some old country roots, but put a different spin on them. Such a stylistic shift might remind listeners...

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' Roses and Ratt (among dozens of others), Ratt took four years off instead of picking its career up by its axles and continuing to run. The band has never really recovered from that mistake...

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 as Black Flag was? And who would expect that a metal band might cover a hip hop institution like the Beastie Boys? The twain just don't meet in wither case – so what is it?...

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 the cross nailed; throughout the album, a series of danceable beats, rock guitars and krautrock synths undulate wildly beneath the soul-searching and self-deprecating sentiments supplied by singer Kristina B. And, amazingly, it nothing collapses under its own...