Madonna reminds me of Michael Jackson circa HIStory. Like MJ, she is sliding somewhere, somewhere irrelevant, and she has fought back by exploiting her past and her present and while in theory what do I care? In practice, I have been a huge fan and this song is drag and a disappointment
After you’ve listened to the first two, what is left? McCartney will be a bore and Van Halen will be a cobbled together piece of crap if “Tattoo” is “Tattoo” is anything to go by. No, the keeper here is gonna be Aior. I’ve been a fan since “The Virgin Suicides” and am looking forward to hearing the techno Kings again.
An energetic call to worldwide lethargy, which seems to define 20 somethings shrugging their way through a downsized life in industrial Allentown. The sort of place that sucks so bad, Billy Joel used it as a metaphor for blue collar workers.
I like the liquidity, there is something sinuous about the band as they go about the hardcore rituals they are saddled with.Even the name Pissed Jeans suggest things about bodily fluids and discharges. They slip and slide through punk, prog, hardcore. They are lizard kings of jeans
So with the world watching, Madonna enters the field to Vogue, as though she is three types of Cleopatra’s and proceeds to, well, vogue. The sound is loud and tinny, and, never a particularly melodic song, it is all dance moves and bass bottom. Who is playing? Sounds like DJs and backing tapes to me.
Representing the English glam hard rock which would morph Stateside into hair metal, UK band the Darkness return to Irving Plaza on Monday. Expect lots of recycled riffing and some killer melodies Foxy Shazzam opening.
The problem with Lana’s album is the great thing about Cohen’s: the production. It is so de rigeur. The beats are so received, so often heard, so similar and so kinda out of place. Whatever you wanna say about Cohen, it sounds exactly like itself
I Born To Die is an excellent album, I thought she was fine on SNL and though I am a touch tired of “Video Games” by now, she is first rate here, singing the aforementioned on the Letterman Show.
Dance is changing over the last couple of months. If its emotional concerns are still somewhat on the lame side, the flip is a musical deepening of the sound. “We Found Love” is one, “Titanium” is another
Grooveallegiance -Funadelica – I am so excited to be seeing the great man on Wednesday and it gives me the perfect excuse to blast Funkadelica and Parliament for days on end. To be reasonable about it, what else could I want?
Metallica were beyond cliches like “cool”. There were times when they were the only metal band that mattered. It was as simple as that. But before the Sandman enters, he wrecks destruction on your body and brains so somewhere in the folllowing 30 years they stopped being cool characters from an update of “On The Road” and became terrifying refugees from a Victorian Goth novel
Around the mid-way point, the Teens get a little serious and the dark notes overtake the ebullience. But they recover and mostly this is the purist of pop pop gems., harmonies, guitars, indie pop flavors and a sensibility many, many alt pop bands can’t quote get tTheir problem is they make it look too easy. Grade: A-
The Imposter -Steve Nieve’s organ pumps right through this bedeviled soul sound put under another brilliant Costello lyric. The song ends with the two best lines on the album: “He’ll only bring you you souvenirs, it’s only going to end in tears”.
Divine intervention is stuff a fluffy brained bible thumping country bumpkin multi-millionaire has NO CLUE ABOUT. Not only does this sound AWFUL,it is complete and utter dribble.
King dropped her guitar, picked up her banjo and got quite nice. Her good humor got the better of me and her self evident penultimate moment”Good to be A Man” was only beaten by her ultimate moment, a hip hop singalong song about having her pussy sucked.
Flea is central t to the band. RHCP’s sound begins and ends with the bass. Everybody builds around it. Every song, even the ballads rests with Flea.
The problem here isn’t the (over) singing which is great, especially Neap. Or the production which is pretty perfect especially the drums with an extra echo on the back flip. Or the sentiments, which are kinda funny, “act like a woman, think like a man”. It’s the song. Which sucks
Leonard is a bore, croaking about loving and croaking.
Craig is the property of Jesus who won’t stop thumping you with his Bible and his album is inconsistent. Lana is the definition of a shallow thinking dealing deeply with shallow subjects.
There is something denigrating about the entire enterprise. If Beyonce is being immortalized in bronz now, what will they do for her when she is 60? Where is there left to go?
I stripped them away and decided their was only two types of pop music: Mainstream and alternative. Look at it this way, Calvin Harris is mainstream, Skrillex is alternative. Nickelback are mainstream, Fucked Up are alternative.
At least he can be happy to get his when he is still alive, as Lennon and Harrison received theirs more than 7 years after their death.
So, I took a look at the setlists they’ve been playing and the first thing I notice is, along with “Under The bridge” and “Scar Tissue” is… NO “This Is The Place”!!! Hey, no “Brendan’s Death Song” either. Actually, not that much from the newbie.
Listening to the charts is like watching Lifetime Movie Channel: it is all female empowerment and male bashing. Fine by me if the songs didn’t suck. Know what I’d like to set fire to? Just guess.
Tim claims this is his best album ever, begging an answer to the musical question, what is his second best like? A truly awful Luke Warm 100 -only Drake and Lamb Of God are must hears.
These guys can get too far out their even for my tastes, a rambunctious, beat heavy slam. And this is more of the same, but at least the drum triplicates are a nice hook and the words are chanted but not so harsh you want to run away and hide.
Dressed in jeans and a printed tee, Ed enjoined the stage with an emotionally bent opening number. Moving between two mics, one taping to a loop he (over) uses as back up to his sole accompaniment, an acoustic guitar
saw quite a few offers to buy U2 albums legally. So McGuinness made his incendiary comment without checking.
Wasted Days – Cloud Nothings -I would give Steve Albini more credit for his production, if they hadn’t expanded sounded so good in concert. A very powerful, somewhat flawed album.
How Campbell managed to maintain his cheer, his demeanor, his happiness, in a situation that, simple age not being the only problem, but with his life drawing to a close, is a testament to music and to a certain power of faith and good will.
Anything that opens with a call to “wake up, wake up, wake up…” will either kill or it won’t. This one does and works its magic, love as a wake up call
Never before has a band been so aptly named. In business since the 1990s, they have a spritely power pop sound that exudes youthfulness and high spirits and fervor and this, from their first album in five years, has lost nothing. Eager and able to please, it is just terrific.
With the “rock never sleeps” page, administered by myself, Helen Bach and Alyson Camus, we plan to put up 5 posts a day from the website as well as various news from other places as well as normal FB stuff, and breaking news
“We’re talking A Collection of Songs…(2 LPs), Oh Holy Fools (Son Ambulance lives!), Letting Off the Happiness, Every Day and Every Night, Fevers and Mirrors (2 LPs), and There Is No Beginning to the Story. The doubles are $23 (180-gram), the EPs are $13 and the LPs are $15 (180-gram).”
At $750? I don’t think so. .By the way I could have gone to see Mumford And Sons, Coldplay and, er, Jon Stewart, at Amnesty International’s “The Policeman’s Ball”. Thankfully, the $550 cost stopped me. I chose not to go.
It is strange, but very human, for McCartney to have bent the truth with his co-writer not around to question him. “Yesterday” is a signature acheivement (incidentally, I can’t stand it), and even with all the accolades Macca has received, he still wants one he doesn’t deserve
When I die I want it to be just like Michael Fassbinder’s Paul in “Haywire”, Martial Arts Warrior Gina Carona strangles him to death between his thighs in Steve Soderburgh’s action movie.
Here’s what’s what. Tix for the Rolling Stones, D’Angelo and, if she comes back to town, Laura Marling.
The man who all but invented dub. For heaven’s sake THE MAN WHO CO-WROTE “POLICE AND THIEVES”, has to work for money.
Still cool, still New York and still very, very funny. Should she be endorsing institutionalized gambling? Sure, if she is this good at it.
Around the time Usher released this huge hit, he was well on his way to becoming what he claimed he most wanted to: the next Michael jackson. But the problem with being the next MJ is not black, it’s white. Usher couldn’t crossover all the way, he wasn’t quite poppy enough and there was an edge of sexual intimidation with him.
Comfortable with metal but truly the definition of a hard rock band, it was an amazing performance. Whether dedicating a cover of “I Only Want To Be With You” to his wife, or dedicating “Fallen” to all of us who have lost someone, Poulsen performed a masterclass in how to sell rock and roll in 2012.
His guitar playing is excellent, on “Whose Life (Is It Anyway)”, he is fast, he is fluid, and he plays the bottleneck like a champ, trilling out notes like a prog rock Jesus. On the aptly name “Guns Booze And Drugs” he makes you wonder why he doesn’t use back up singers more often and throughout, the sleep, too short and not loud enough set he makes sense of a “Dave Mustaine Is God” tee-shirt I noticed.
Some weeks are just plain expensive. I awoke on Monday, January 23rd with $600 safely nestled in my savings account, playing and by Saturday the 28th, it was gone into the pockets of the rich and famous. Here is how.
The set was 15 minutes of Goth beauty and two singers trading off in spirals of dark notes and black chords as they chased each up and down the Theater’s wide stage. They ended with “Heaven’s A Lie” and managed the thankless job at hand with a hard, dark, emotional deep waters
I’d probably die to Jeff Buckley, I guess there probably wouldn’t be any other way. Good music. Good music to die to, send me on my way to heaven, heavenly voice, heavenly tunes. But I have a couple of records that are sort of near and dear to me
None of this available on Spotify. Yet? They never got Lana’s EP, they say Cohen not available in the US, the Beatles won’t be on Spotify for another 30 years and I don’t know about M.I.A. but I’m not gonna wait.
Rendezvous – the dB’s – In which Pete Holsapple goes to Graceland and has an epiphany of sorts, though not the Pilgrimage Paul Simon did. Instead he wanders around Graceland and calls out the King: “Taking Care Of Business” doesn’t mean a thing”.
The set was everything you could ask for except I’d hoped he’d have thrown in “Ramones”. Two killer tracks off Ace Of Spades” and terrific straight up no chaser “Going To Brazil”, a distant Lemmy who peers out over his cat to tell us he wants to hear us shout our esophoagus through out throat
the band did get the momentum they wanted, and given the genre they are exercising in, they quite often transformed it with songs that keep on peaking out from the rumbling of strum and feedback.
Elvis doesn’t improve on the originals, ever. And the Hank Williams cover is awful. BUT, I had never heard these songs before and for me… it just blew me away. Imagine hearing “Color Of The Blues” “Brown To Blue” “Good Year For The Roses” FOR THE FIRST TIME.
