Category: Reviews
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Nehedar is what NYC-based singer/songwriter Emilia Cataldo goes by, much the way Natasha Khan calls herself Bat For Lashes or Sarah Assbring calls herself El Perro Del Mar. Let’s face it — it’s trendy for female solo artists to give themselves a cool name these days. But Emilia didn’t just start calling herself Nehedar because…
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Every time a new Megadeth album comes out, I listen to it and find myself thinking, damn, this is the best Megadeth in years. Perhaps, then, they’ve been getting progressively better. It’s also possible — if not probable — that I’ve forgotten how good the previous album was by the time a new album comes…
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Initially, I was disappointed that this new Black Sabbath album, the first in something like 20 years to feature Geezer Butler (bass), Tony Iommi (guitar) and Ozzy Osbourne (vocals), didn’t have any catchy songs like “Iron Man” and “Paranoid.” I felt like, didn’t they want to hook people? I’ve been frustrated with Iron Maiden for…
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United World Rebellion: Chapter One is Skid Row’s third release to feature vocalist Johnny Solinger, who’s been their singer for a decade now, which is probably close to how long original vocalist Sebastian Bach was in the band. Their first release with Solinger was called Thickskin and it found the band trying on an alternative…
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If I understand correctly, this is the chorus of “The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here,” the title track of Alice In Chain’s new album: “The devil put dinosaurs here / Jesus don’t like a queer / The devil put dinosaurs here / No problem with faith just fear.” Now analyze that. Seriously. Because I don’t get…
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Daft Punk will undoubtedly be this year’s most successful electronic music duo (even if much of their latest album was produced with live instruments), but Australia’s Empire Of The Sun won’t be kept down under on the charts for much longer if there’s any justice in this world of pop. Just listen to “Alive,” the…
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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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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…
