Hard

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Blood Money Part 0 LP by Dope. While the sequence in which the parts of Blood Money are supposed to play is a little unclear (that this LP is numbered part zero implies it’s supposed to be a prequel to Blood Money Part 1 – which was released in 2016 – and while the last song on this album is numbered 13 on the back cover, there are only twelve cuts...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into All Them Witches’ Nothing as the Ideal LP. Over the last five years or so, I’ve become acquainted with Nashville’s All Them Witches; reviewed a couple of their albums and gotten to feel like I know the band – or at least know what to expect from them from album to album. I figured I knew, for example, that their psychedelic/classic rock amalgam would end up being a consistent thread through the...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2017 vinyl reissue of Hard Promises by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. When it comes to making a follow-up for a career-defining release, the catch is that whatever comes can often feel like a diminished return no matter how good it might be because the new music simply does not have the same spark which ignited the breakthrough of the previous album. It’s kind of heartbreaking to concede that possibility, but...

Mastodon Emperor Of Sand (Reprise/Warner) After having spent the last few years stretching stylistically in a few different directions (The “White Walker” single found a home as the lead track for a season of HBO’s Game Of Thrones, 2014’s Once More ‘Round The Sun say the band get leaner and almost blurring the lines between metal and punk rock a bit), there’s something refreshing and exciting about the fact that Mastodon has made a glorious return to the sort of...

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...

A critical evaluation of Big Hard Sex Criminals Volume 1 by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky. I don’t know whether Sex Criminals is an imaginative idea or a sign that we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Get this – the whole premise is that these two kids (and I say “kids” to be cute) find each other and discover that they can stop time somehow when they achieve orgasm. And what do they do with this power? They...

If you see enough “rock n’ roll” movies, eventually you begin to realize that there are always a few key points that are totally unbelievable: the best bands came from nothing (and a lot of them started by accident); their rise to greatness really begins at the moment the hardworking group sticks it to the man and starts doing things their own way, they reach a pinnacle of appeal and creative power at roughly the same time or immediately before...