album

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...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the High Hopes LP by Like A Motorcycle. There are few scenes that appear in motion pictures which are more worrisome than those where light explodes on the screen and, after the camera’s focus adjusts, viewers realize they’re staring up from the floor of the trunk of a car. The reason that image is disarming is because the trunk is a small space – it is incredibly confined and exists as a...

Artist: Great Apes Album: California Heart Label: Asian Man Records It may have taken a few releases for the band to get the bugs worked out of their sound (they’ve already got one full-length album, one comp which collected a bunch of previously released tracks and a bunch of singles and EPs on top of that too), but Great Apes have truly found their magic on California Heart – their sophomore Asian Man-released album. That is not to say California...

Artist: The Dean Ween Group Album: The Deaner Album Label: ATO Records/Cadence Ever since Ween announced its dissolution in 2012, the band’s fans have agonized over what might come next from founding members Aaron “Gene Ween” Freeman and Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo. Some of them figured they pretty much had the group’s dynamic nailed; because Melchiondo was the huskier-voiced entity in the group and already had side projects like Moist Boyz on his resume, the lighter, more “songwriterly” material must...

Artist: Mike Doughty Album: Haughty Melodic (CD reissue) Label:ATO Records I must preface this review by saying that I have been a Mike Doughty fan for an incredibly long time. I first became a fan when I discovered Soul Coughing; at that time, I had grown tired of grunge’s (by then) floundering, poor self-image (the genre as a whole really had difficulty regaining its strength and composure after the death of Kurt Cobain) and was looking for something which was...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into a vinyl copy of Diamond Dogs by David Bowie. While it might  not sound like the greatest endorsement of an album’s quality or of the creative foresight possessed by an artist on the surface, the adage that Diamond Dogs exemplifies first is “Just because an idea doesn’t work out in its intended manner does not mean it should be thrown away and forgotten.” The manner in which David Bowie’s eighth album lives that...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Guitar Boy LP by Bloodshot Bill. The moment I first saw Bloodshot Bill will forever be burned into both my eyeballs and my memory. It was at the Middle East in Cambridge while waiting for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to go on. And here comes this guy, wearing a robe, hair slicked back, armed with nothing but a guitar, bass drum and hi hat. What followed was thirty minutes of...