album

Sass Jordan Racine Revisited (Linus Entertainment) Twenty-five years ago, Sass Jordan made her first big breakthrough onto Canadian radio airwaves with her sophomore album Racine. It was very much a “right place, right time” kind of moment; with bands like the Black Crows and singers like Melissa Etheridge holding a whole lot of time and space on playlists around the country, Jordan fit right in with the time and tastes of a mainstream rock radio audience who was still hearing...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Blau Sang Vermell Cel LP by CRIM. The catch, when it comes to working within any pop music-based form (and, as inconvenient as it is to say, punk rock definitely falls into that category), is that language plays a key role in the music’s accessibility. Simply said, if a band’s not speaking the mother tongue of the country they’re playing to, they’ve already alienated a fairly an impressive portion of its...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2017 vinyl reissue of Full Moon Fever by Tom Petty. There’s no way to say for sure if the reason Tom Petty elected to launch his solo career with Full Moon Fever was because the singer felt like he had a surplus of songs that he didn’t want to bring to the Heartbreakers, or if he was just trying to make a point. If it was because he didn’t want to...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2LP+1CD deluxe edition of the Singles soundtrack. While there are several great soundtracks which were released in the 1990s (the Tank Girl, The Crow and Great Expectations soundtracks all leap to mind), arguably the greatest and most culturally important of the lot proved to be that of Cameron Crow’s first “rock memory scrapbook” picture, Singles. The reason for that is pretty easy to explain; released in 1992, Singles happened to come...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Vine LP by Jen Gloeckner. Anyone who has ever gone to therapy knows that it can take years to accurately qualify, articulate and compartmentalize feelings like anger, resentment, isolation, love, affection, confusion and emotional unease and then begin to deal with them in a healthy manner. It’s all a process and, in that regard, Jen Gloeckner has arrived miles ahead of the game on her third album, Vine; after having slugged...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Modern Pressure LP by Daniel Romano. If we can all agree that the key to having an enduring career in music lies in an artist’s ability to always have listeners guessing excitedly at what they might have in store next from album to album, there’s no chance that interest in Daniel Romano’s music will wane anytime soon. Since the singer first appeared fronting a hardcore band in 2005, Romano has leapt...

Artist: Metallica Album: Hardwired… To Self-Destruct (Deluxe Edition 3CD) Label: Blackened/ADA/Warner Music It’s funny how the psychology of salesmanship works – after a certain point, one has to wonder where the logic goes. A great example of that can be found in the Deluxe Edition, 3CD version of Hardwired… To Self-Destruct. As previously stated in my review of the standard-issue 2CD version of the release, Metallica’s new album is a great trip back to the early, shreddy and fairly lean...

Artist: Rascal Flatts Album: The Greatest Gift Of All Label: Big Machine Records/Sony Music What do people mean when they say “that music moved me”? Moved you from your seat to turn it up? Moved you from the room to get away from the twisted sounds of crashing and banging? Moved you to shake your bottom and get a groove on? For me, music is a background noise that is always on when I am working, cleaning, playing, cooking, bathing...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the deluxe 2LP reissue of Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite by Maxwell. It’s incredible how wide the stream of creativity was in the mainstream music scene of 1996. While rock had finally started to get itself worked out following the death of Kurt Cobain (there were a few good rock records that year – Ministry released Filth Pig, Lou Reed put out Set The Twilight Reeling, The Wallflowers released Bringing Down The Horse...

Artist: Green Day Album: Revolution Radio Label: Reprise/Warner It will probably sound strange to the legions of fans that Green Day has won in the years since the release of American Idiot (let’s be honest – the band now has some supporters who are too young to remember when Kerplunk! was released), but the first words which will cross the minds of fans who were at least tall enough to get into the Gilman when Dookie blew up as they...