For her first album of new material since 1994’s Pure and Simple, Joan Jett has elected to go back to basics with Sinner. 'Back to basics,' in this case, means playing to the singer’s strengths: heavy handed guitar riffs and Jett’s own signature mezzo soprano growling vocals take stage center over The Blackhearts’ hard-driving rhythms that, this time, have a more distinctly pop edge than they have in over twenty years. Even with that said though, we’re not talking about...
Have you ever wondered what you’d get if you were to crossbreed the gods of Brit-pop (London Suede, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses) with the crème of both the Matador and Tee Pee Records stoner rock crops (Dead Meadow, Annihilation Time)? Apparently Darker My Love did and, on the band’s appropriately entitled sophomore album, 2, they’ve ironed all of the creases out of their sound and produced what can only be called a definitive document. The record opens with majesty and...
It sounds like it should be a semantic debate, but The Dollyrots make the difference between pop-punk and punk- pop very, very obvious on their sophomore album.Pop-punk is the soft stuff – the best-known of the lot would probably be Green Day, No Doub t and Sublime – but punk-pop is ro ugh, tumble and poppy of course but also incredibly sarcastic and sardonic & ndash; all traits that The Dollyrots sho wcase masterfully o n Because I’m Awesome.< br...
A friend of mine took me to task last month for wimping out and not listing my favorite album covers. I had my excuses. In the first place, last month's column was long enough to begin with; I had other issues I was more interested in. Secondly, I didn't want to take the time to decide on my personal favorites. I don't have a ready mental list of my favorite album covers, like I do for my favorite albums (and...
Few of the bands to survive the collapse of alt-rock have held as much enduring appeal as Rage Against The Machine. For the seven years they were at the top of the pile of bands getting talked about, dissected and carried around on the shoulders of politically-aware hard rock and hip-hop aficionados, RATM did more than just win the hearts and ears of a lot of people, they created a mythos that was bigger than the music they made. That’s...
Over the last couple of years, somehow ‘indie rock’ (which, for those keeping score, started out as a colloquial contraction for ‘independent rock’) became less a term for how and on what scale music was distributed and more a point of definition for a particular sound. Once, ’indie rock’ was music made on a tiny budget with tiny or modest ambitionsin mind but, now, it is more a term that defines ’tiny music’. Whether ’tiny’ refers to the scope, overall...
Over the last couple of years, somehow ‘indie rock’ (which, for those keeping score, started out as a colloquial contraction for ‘independent rock’) became less a term for how and on what scale music was distributed and more a point of definition for a particular sound. Once, ’indie rock’ was music made on a tiny budget with tiny or modest ambitionsin mind but, now, it is more a term that defines ’tiny music’. Whether ’tiny’ refers to the scope, overall...
Gavin Rossdale was wise to let six years lapse between the implosion of alt-frauds Bush and embarking on a solo career. He learned the hard way just how bad a taste he’d left in the public’s mouth when his short-lived follow-up band, Institute, failed to make any headway at all in spite of getting plenty of exposure opening for U2 on their Vertigo Tour in 2004; people were simply not ready or willing to subject themselves to Rossdale’s form of...
Oh, the woes of being a music journalist. (Disclaimer: I use the term “music journalist” loosely… This site obviously offers an amazing forum for fans and people with an ability to write to provide commentary on their favorite shows, bands and albums, but despite my state college degree in journalism and the fact that I once staged a brief sit-in in the lobby of Rolling Stone’s New York office because nobody would take my resume, I’m no Ben Fong-Torres. I...