Month: June 2013
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I started covering Paola & Chiara over a decade ago when I was writing a world music column called Import Zone for Lollipop magazine. (I couldn’t find every column I wrote about them in, but I did manage to find the one with my review of their 2002 album Festival, which you can read here:…
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Back in April a Queensrÿche album called Frequency Unknown was released. And it was terrible. The 10 new songs were so generic that they were painful to listen to. Or maybe it was the production and/or mixing. The drums sounded like tin cans. Actually, that’s an insult to tin cans. I don’t mean that as…
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Austra hail from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, but chances are you probably already know that. After all, their 2011 debut, Feel It Break, was listed on numerous critics’ best of 2011 lists, following a year of positive reviews. The Toronto Star and New York even named it the best album of the year. Basically, Feel It…
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Once upon a time a Norwegian group released a couple of acoustic jazz albums. But, apparently having diverse tastes in music, their next two albums incorporated progressive rock and experimental metal sounds. Then they worked with black metal vikings Enslaved on a concerto that was actually commissioned by a top European jazz festival. That collaboration…
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Kanye recently stated that God is a “featured guest” on his new album Yeezus. (I’m not sure where he said this, but it’s all over the internet so, you know, it must be true.) STRYPER sent the following reply to TMZ and it’s hilarious: “First of all, and with all due respect, how is it…
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The new single by Editors, “A Ton Of Love,” is up-tempo song taken from their latest album, The Weight of Your Love. Usually Editors remind me of The Killers and Franz Ferdinand, but this particular track reminds me of Springsteen, given its potent drumming, the tone of Tom Smith’s moving vocals and the shimmering horns.…
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Usually when a band takes its name from another band’s song, they’re doomed to never be as good as the band they’ve gotten their name from. For all of their accomplishments, Godsmack will never be as good as Alice In Chains. At least not in my opinion. Doom metal band Demon Lung have taken their…
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In 2008 Nouvelle Vague co-founder/musician Marc Collin did a side-project album called Hollywood, Mon Amour. The album featured songs from ’80’s movies covered Nouvelle Vague style, meaning that they were the sort of covers that are often drastically different than the original versions of the song, though care is taken when making these interpretations because…
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Produced by Chris “Zeuss” Harris (Killswitch Engage, Soulfly), Eye of the Storm is the new E.P. by New York City’s Eye Ra Haze and it’s mighty impressive. In fact, its three songs are the most potent female-fronted hard rock I’ve heard since Evanescence’s Fallen, which was released 10 years ago. Since then, an awful lot…
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The French band Indochine have now been at it for 32 years and are usually regarded in the way people regard musical gods like U2, The Beatles and Johnny Cash. In other words, people consider their music a form of high art and deem them music royalty. Well, their fans do anyway. And they have…
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Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner appears on the new Queens Of The Stone Age album and it would seem he was influenced by them from the sound of the new Monkeys’ song, “Do I Wanna Know?” The guitars on the mid-tempo number sound ever so slightly QOTSA-ish and there’s no denying that the sludge-ish beat of…
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I’ll always miss Wolfmother, but, let’s face it, Andrew was the voice, guitarist and chief songwriter, so he basically *is* Wolfmother. So, I suppose it made sense that he would release his new album under his own name after the last line-up of Wolfmother disbanded. But there’s another reason why this album is better suited…
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Shadows is the third album by Australian singer/songwriter Lenka. Her name might not sound familiar, but you’ve surely heard her music as it’s been featured on Grey’s Anatomy and in the movie Moneyball, as well as appearing in advertisements for Apple, Coke and Old Navy. Billy Crystal even sang part of “The Show” — a…
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Critically acclaimed singer/songwriter Jann Klose was born in Germany and raised in Hamburg and Kenya, South Africa. He arrived in the United States as an exchange student in Cleveland. It wasn’t long before he was performing in the Cleveland Opera Chorus. He went on to perform in touring productions of such Broadway shows as Jesus…
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These New Puritans have always been rather bizarre and I’m pleased to say that they continue to be so. That said, they’re three albums in now and they’ve yet to make the same album twice. On the contrary, if you played someone all three albums they would never guess that they were all the work…
