Reprise

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Way Down in the Rust Bucket 4LP set by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. In the fifty-two years which have made up his career to date, Neil Young has been a lot of things – an activist, a fortune teller, an elder statesman, a folkie, a rock star, a filmmaker and other titles too – but he has never seemed to be lighthearted. The singer has been interested in making a...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Neil Young’s After The Gold Rush LP. It’s not easy to articulate what kind of mark a fiftieth anniversary represents. Those who remain married for fifty years call it their Golden anniversary (or Golden Jubilee) and, while it’s not uncommon to live longer in the twenty-first century, fifty years is still a pretty significant event – it is half a century, after all. The point, ultimately is that a lot of life...

A deeper look at the grroves pressed into the hot pink, limited edition pressing of Father of All Motherfuckers by Green Day. After a span of sixteen years spent examining a series of high-concept creative endeavors (American Idiot started the trend in 2004 and catapulted Green Day onto an echelon of rock stardom that no one imagined possible for the band before, followed by another concept album in the form of 21 st Century Breakdown and a three-album vanity project,...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Goodbye Sunshine Hello Nighttime LP by Family Of The Year. It’s funny how, as similar to one another as every Family Of The Year has been to date, Goodbye Sunshine Hello Nighttime feels like a significant departure and/or move forward for the band. That Goodbye Sunshine Hello Nighttime is the group’s first album for Reprise after enjoying a celebrated 2LP+1EP stretch at Nettwerk is irrelevant – Family Of The Year has...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Revolution Radio LP by Green Day. Some smart aleck is going to say that this review is a bit late in coming (yes, Revolution Radio was released fourteen months ago) but that’s part of the point here; Green Day’s twelfth album was touted as a much-needed return to the band’s roots after almost a decade spent releasing concept albums and enormous album trilogies (plus a fourth CD/DVD conglomerate for good measure)....

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...

Artist: My Chemical Romance Album: The Black Parade + Living With Ghosts (10th Anniversary 2CD) Label: Reprise/Warner Upon first sight of the tenth anniversary edition of The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance, even the greatest and most fanatical of the band’s fans will find themselves asking, “What the fuck is this?” They’ll be asking not because anything is wrong exactly, just that they won’t be able to immediately recognize what they’re looking at; unlike the original release of The...

Neil Young and Bluenote Cafe Bluenote Cafe 2CD (Reprise/Warner) Many things could be said for and about Neil Young but, without a doubt, that he was never brash enough to follow a questionable artistic lede through to its conclusion is not one of them. One of the best examples of that can be found in the guitarist’s straight-up blues/R&B period; in the late Eighties (read: long after The Blues Brothers might have made the sound popular enough to turn Bluenote...

Neil Young + Promise of The Real The Monsanto Years (Reprise/Warner) Can we all just agree to stop picking on Neil Young for a couple minutes, readers? Granted, the singer has left himself open for lots of critical abuse over the years (the most recent event that nobody wants to talk about is Pono), but there’s a time and place for everything and trying to rip apart The Monsanto Years on the basis of past errors isn’t it. So is...