“Closing Time” is the name of Joseph “Catch 22” Heller’s last novel where he revisits his iconic characters still paralyzed by fear of death. Which is a whole other Catch 22, of course. We are terrified of dying and we are gonna die anyway
This is pure Hollywood fantasy and it leaves no one unsullied in its humorless dross.Are women really so full of self-loathing, they seem themselves in this needy trash? The question with a movie like this is: whose fantasy is it any way?
“I don’t mind living on my own’ is a good as a call for post-college freedom from 20 something yob brother Gallaghers. The sorry is almost placating here, it seems edged into a tremulous forever present. So I guess it is sad because time took that now away from then.
In 1982, I interview 1982 I interviewed the Jesus And Mary Chain for Creem and in the middle of the accompanying article, allowed it to go off the deep end as I detailed a terrible break up I was going through
listening to Spotify Staff’s best of 2011 reveals that they are male, middle class recent college grads. There taste runs to marijuana, maybe even heroin, but definitely nothing speedy. And that they are addicted to melodic alt-rock with the accent on folk not rock.
The ambivalence is self-evident, it feels like by calling for Clark’s retirment we are in the process of warehousing the aged. Still, Clark is a very rich and very successful man. It is time for the American teenager to set down.
From Jack of the Cosmonauts thru Wade of KiLR, all the way to Jagger, Daltry, Bono, the lead singer of a rock band sets the tone and leads the band and it is just about impossible to have a great band without a great lead singer.
I’m listening to Kurt Vile as I wrote and I am not certain that is a good thing at all. “Music like scent has an immediate neuro pathway that can bypass your thinking brain and effect your emotional state.”
now it’s all over, like a telescopic love seen from a distance, always in the rearview mirror and stuck in this eternal present. It is alway January and February. The seventh year of a marriage, the cold, blustery boring part of the year
Mike “A Wombling Christmas” Batt wrote this song for Art and it feels like a thematic contination to Simon’s “The Only Living Boy In New York” , there is also a sense of AOR Beach Boy-y updated. “It’s not the sun you’re trying to find, something else is on your mind…”
Robert Burns poem of remembrance, has been around for 250 years and everywhere I know gets a good airing, even though the lyric seems a little nonsensesy. It isn’t. It suggest we remember the past as we move in the future.
a great country crooner, on a farewell tour after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Of all Alzheimer’s insidious torture, at least it is slow enough for us to get the opportunity to see him him one last time. Saturday at Town Hall.
And so Sheeran starts the year at the top of the albums, while his second single off the album “Lego Land” hurls itself into the Top 10. But will it translate Stateside? It is so hard to tell.
I can’t take Coldplay at any priceand even by their standards “Paradise” is a dog. A very popular dog. Coldplay are middle class boys like Blur only without anything close to Blur’s coolness quota, they are pristine bedwetters and uber good guy pop egotists.
Drake in the past, Florence in the present, Laura in the future. Drake is trying to survive a relationship on the skids, Laura is ruminating the price for lying and Florence just wants to get over a hangpver. This is apt stuff for New Year’s Day: the place the present meets the past and the future.
Cosmonauts are four bright sparks who have played catchy if a little dark alt rock for two years in various variations and at Pianos on Wednesday night, played a nothing but pleasurable set of Echo And the Bunnymen quasi-psychedelic jams.
The score by Jonsi of Sigur Ros fame is a beauty, especially the song “Boy Lillikoi” -just a haunting complement to the movies tamed glory
BV is not really music criticism, they are unwilling to get their hands dirty, but they break music story after music story and are completely invaluable when it comes to supporting local bands
A song that is your golden ticket to simply be yourself. Think about it, we spend so much time hiding what we feel- this song is your free pass to letting it all out. The end result being we are loved by those who matter for just being ourselves
The problem is not necessarily in getting 50,000 to buy a song but in getting 50,000 people to buy the song in the same week. So how do we plan to do it? I don’t have the slightest idea but, hey, that’s no reason not to try.
dissipating the slightest of melody, heavily bashed by the bass and drummer Matt Covey anyway, and his guitar becomes steely feedback before switching directions again, and again, till you’re feeling dizzy.
First of all it was presumptuous from the guy to think he would go to heaven once dead, but this is beyond the point…. The person, who is responsible for this bad hoax spoke out!
21 sold more than 5 million copies.The last time an album topped the year-end chart with more than 5 million copies sold was in 2004
New York Times can get too Mr. Loaf-y for my tastes. But even even so, I prefer their arts and entertainment pages to their hard news
next week Christmas and Mistletoe will be in moth balls so what will happen next? I predict, Adele will be back at # 1, essentially because there is nothing else around
Despite LMFAO finally getting the # 1 position, and despite Big Sean getting a remix with Nicki, and despite Adele getting another hit off her album, this is awful bland compared to the UK singles charts at this time of year.
The most bizarre kids song of all time. The titular bull’s biggest ambition was to be part of a bullfight and be stabbed to death by Spanish guys. The moral is… actually, I’n not sure what the moral. dates from 1959, so I guess that might explain it.
Tix go on sale on Friday and 12p and no presales I can see, so you and your luck but definitely worth the attempt.
Of course Smith is an egomaniac, even his kids are and they haven’t accomplished anything yet. As are the three names on this little list.
I was really scared Taylor was going to leave too.Me and Taylor went to a show and after we went out to eat and he was like ‘You know I’m not ready to go anywhere. I still have more to do in Paramore’.
there was every reason to expect the West End Musical of the novel to be a sugar coated morsel, But Lionel Bart wrote it, and it ended up a poisonous bon bon.
Jack introduces to his mindbogglingly excellent material and plays it so well. The sheer wealth of music is a revelation and though i do have one complaint. I wish it was longer
As Alyson Camus noted in her “Not With the Band” column, Christmas week is not the time for new music. I checked on Tuesday 26th, no music, then I checked on Wednesday, 28th… still no new music. Wow, I feel so deserted.
High On Sunday 51 – Aimee Mann – Off her last great album, knocking on a decade ago., a song of adultery and desire and a comparison that works all too well: heroin. The shaky morality is a real pleasure and the encroaching disaster sexy as fuck.
the young sex symbol of modern alt can be seen here crooning rock nyc’s picked to click in 2012’s Lana Del Rey’s great song (made my best of 2011) “Video Games.
At a rave, the audience consuming the music, they are using it for their own distinct ends. Dance, drugs, sex. They are not watching James Brown, they are listening for beats and feeling their heart beats race and their movements, the expression freedom of letting go but controlled. They are the stars.
. With her braces and her curly hair and her tin lunch box, Poly was the opposite of cooldom. And yet she exuded the punk form of cool: the political edgy dangerland. The neo, dayglo, end of the world , tip of the finger, soundstress songstress germfree adolescent wordsmith.
“He is a wonderful man. I love him very much. I’m sorry I’m not a more regular woman. I truly believe though it is painful to admit, we made a mistake rushing into getting married, for altruistic reasons
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of artists out there anymore Rock music is no longer where creativity is and it’s no longer taken seriously by creative people. It’s been absorbed into the mainstream culture and has become too conformist and normal.
The entire Reznor/Ross score is electronic plus organic mayhem and is most effective at its most tense. Still there is nothing as brilliant as the walk across the Harvard campus in “The Social Network”.
Feel Good – Eric Benet feat Faith Evans – Off one of the best albums of 2010, the melody is not the strongest he has written but Evans, one of the most underrated singers, is just terrific.
Yup, we are all busy transitioning into a higher state of something or other and all we can do when famous rock stars die is say a fond adieu and grade them. GRADE THEM!!! Well, what can i tell you, it is in the nature of rock nyc to grade and list everything. Alphabetically
Trey Lorenz -he sang the MJ cover “I’ll Be There” with Mariah Carey, was perfect with the national anthem and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels rapped a Santa Claus number and then performed “Walk This Way” with the Knicks City Dancers behind him and yes, really, two turn tables and actual real scratching.
Neil Young, Pete Townshend, Bob Mould, Jeff Beck, Sting, Eric Clapton, James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Thom Yorke, Colin Greenwood, Ryan Adams, Lemmy Kilminster, Kevin Shields,Blinda Butcher, George Harrison, George Martin, Ted Nugent, U2’s Bono and the Edge, Moby, Phil Collins, Cher, Ozzy Osborne, Huey Lewis, Mick Fleetwood, Charlie Haden, Al Di Meola, Todd Rundgren, Trent Reznor, Will.i.am, all have different degrees of tinnitus.
The song is daring by Taylor’s standards, nothing like anything she’s done before, a haunting folk song that drifts in the night air, and seems to want to sooth and protect but still has an edgy fear about it. It is not an end song, it doesn’t reach a resolution.
According to Rolling Stone Mag, Springsteen told Bob Seger that Bruce’s next album will be his best in years. Where wil that leave RS loathsome 5 star review of “Working On A Dream”? If Dream is 5 stars out of 5 stars, what can they make his new one when Bruce is, indeed, correct and it is a return to form?
By date and graded!! It was a better year for live music than recorded. The reason was, so many oldies came up with the goods on stage. Tops were McCartney and Rod Stewart. Both peaking.
Titus Andronicus – Titus Andronicus – The most self-reflective song ever written. In Stickles frustration at his inability to write the song, “I’ll write my masterpiece some other day” he snarls, he writes his first undeniable masterpiece. A great song. I still listen to it all the time.
Handsome lads, those Gov’t Mules, aren’t they? I will be jamming down with the Southerners, most on leave from the Allman Brothers, this New Year’s Eve at Beacon Theater. What better way to make it past another year?
I don’t mind being manipulated by music, but I don’t enjoy being taken for a fool. Westlife and rebecca Ferguson are just the absolute worse: moribund pathos for people who have o be dragged through their emotional landscape by a nose righ. God, I pray they never crossover here.
