Not So New Wave
There’s no real way to tease this, other than to suggest you go look at it. New Wave Artists Aging Gracefully Well, not all of them are aging gracefully. Be on the lookout for: Boy George (!), Tears For Fears (???), and Simon LeBon (WTF). I think it’s safe to say that Pete Burns has had the most profound change…
American(s) Music
Note: I’ll kick off my look back at the music of 2013 later this week. Here’s an appetizer about music in, but not of, 2013. I forget what the motivation was, but for some reason last night I decided to check and see when season two of The Americans was supposed to start. Unofficially, I found early February. Which is…
Old = Good But Never Great. Pearl Jam Lightning Bolt Review
For some reason it’s been very hard to write up my thoughts about Pearl Jam’s Lightning Bolt. Not because I don’t like it; I do. Not because it follows the same basic formula the band has been using for nearly a decade; that is true but that doesn’t make it indistinguishable from the last two albums. Not because there’s nothing…
Rock God Math
My current favorite music writer, Steven Hyden, goes beyond the simple album review for the new Pearl Jam disk. Instead, he examines the band’s entire career, assesses what’s overrated, what’s underrated, and what’s been properly rated, and then does the final math. Pearl Jam made some great records in the ’90s, some not-so-great records in the early ’00s, and some…
For Those About To Rock
I recently came across a new classic rock station1 that has a “Twelve O’Clock Double Shot” lunch show. Which is great, because I pick up L. at 1:00 so while I’m sitting in line waiting for the kids to come out, I get to listen to the last few minutes of the program. One day last week I lucked into a…
FR Friday
I don’t obsess about music the way I once did. I blame that on the digital music revolution. As much as I love having access to a seemingly endless stream of music, it also means I don’t live with an album for weeks at a time the way I once did. But there are exceptions to that, certainly, whether it’s…
Slow It Down And Play It Again
Each week, as I go through my RSS feeds, Twitter, email, and other mediums through which I find cool stuff, I come across things that I’ll open up in my browser but forget about. They may sit in an open tab for days, but at some point a mental alarm goes off and I think, “Well, I haven’t read that…
25 Favorite Songs Of All Time, 2013 Edition
As I mentioned a couple weeks back, it’s been five years since I first posted my 20 Favorite Songs of All-Time list. Which means it’s time to review and tweak the list. There wasn’t any great, complex methodology to this. I simply took the original list and evaluated those 20 songs against each other. There was some movement, and one…
So Very Eighties
Last weekend I was sitting around, enjoying an 80-Acre Hoppy Wheat when Madness’ classic 1983 tune “Our House” came on the radio. Being the reflective cat I am1, I savored my beer and considered that I very well could have been listening to the same song exactly 30 years before that moment. I also thought if you had to sum…
A Few Digital Music Thoughts
The horse is long out of the barn. That’s my reaction to Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke’s announcement earlier this week that he was pulling his solo and Atoms For Peace music from the streaming service Spotify to protest the minuscule royalty payments it, and other similar services, issues to artists. I absolutely agree with his point: there needs to…