Category: Reviews

  • When Dido first started talking about this album she said that it would have more of an electronic sound than her previous albums, but apparently she changed her mind when she was working on it. Or maybe the songs just naturally didn’t go in that direction. Because, honestly, I don’t feel like Girl Who Got…

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  • Up until now, I’d avoided OneRepublic’s albums. Just hearing their singles on the radio was more than enough for me. I could never really get an idea of who they actually were from songs like “Secrets” and “Good Life.” They mostly sounded generic to my ears and when they didn’t they felt like they were…

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  • It’s funny — I can review music in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Greek, etc, but when it comes to French I always struggle. The problem is that I know some French, but I’m far from being fluent, so I understand just enough of the lyrics to get a general idea of what a song is…

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  • It’s hard to believe it’s been just over six years since Justin Timberlake released his massively successful album FutureSex/LoveSounds. I often found myself wishing he’d release a new album during that time, especially when I’d see him in mediocre movies like In Time, Friends with Benefits and Black Snake Moan. To be fair, I rather…

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  • “Broken Record” will be the third track on Little Boots’ highly anticipated new album Nocturnes, which will be released on May 7th. It was written by Little Boots and Rick Nowels and is now on sale on iTunes and Amazon. It starts off with warm synthesized strings and soon erupts with a fine modern dance…

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  • The Vaccines’ Come of Age was one of my favorite albums of 2012. I never reviewed it because I felt like it was too far to the left of what I normally listen to for me to accurately write about it. Their songs are a mix of lo-fi and punk and I’m not hugely knowledgeable…

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  • This Manchester duo’s 2010 debut album, Happiness, garnered them almost universal acclaim. I don’t think I ever read a single review of the album that wasn’t at least 90% positive. And so I was shocked when reviews of Exile, their just-released sophomore effort, started surfacing and were almost 90% negative. By the time I finally…

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  • It begins with what sounds like a military air-raid siren before a massive beat begins stomping all over the place like it’s a lost Ice Cube track from 1991. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think it was a new hip-hop track. But wait — she actually does kind of rap this song, sounding…

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  • There was a song on Bon Jovi’s last album, The Circle, called “Work For The Working Man.” It found Jon Bon Jovi aligning himself with the blue collar worker. “I lost my pension, they took my I.D.,” he sang and fans, well, they didn’t like it. The consensus was that Jon was too rich to…

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  • The cover art for The Next Day is the cover of Bowie’s 1977 album Heroes with a white box that simply reads “The Next Day” in the center, concealing 90% of the original cover art by Masayoshi Sukita. This obscured album cover comes courtesy of Jonathan Barnbrook, who also designed the art for Bowie’s criminally…

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  • Japanese singer/songwriter Rihwa teamed up with American singer/songwriter Michelle Branch for this lovely duet, which Branch wrote after asking Rihwa if she’d be interested in collaborating, something Rihwa became extremely excited about, having become a fan of Michelle’s music when she was attending school in Canada.  The mid-tempo, guitar-centric track is entirely in English, but…

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  • Kate Nash’s new album, Girl Talk, couldn’t be any further removed from her 2007 debut, Made of Bricks. But those who liked the new direction she took with her 2010 album My Best Friend Is You, which featured raw songs like “Kiss That Grrrl” and “Do-Wah-Doo,” will likely appreciate it. If not, well, one gets…

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  •   Four years ago, I found myself in a strange accident. Somewhere in a concert venue in downtown Dublin, my leg snapped at a sharp angle and my entire cartilage was completely destroyed. It was in march 2009, and when I left the emergency room that night with my headphones in my ears, and a…

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  • Delphic’s name refers to the oracle of the Greek god Apollo at Delphi. And you would have thought they were descended from such a god based on the stellar reviews their debut album Acolyte received. It was as though they were writing the reviews themselves, they were so unanimously positive. I wasn’t writing reviews myself…

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  • Sally Shapiro is not a solo artist. We only see the beautiful blonde, fairy-like girl, who does use the pseudonym Sally Shapiro, but technically Sally Shapiro is a duo, the other half consisting of musician/producer Johan Agebjörn. That might sound a little confusing, but I think they like it that way. There’s always an element…

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