It’s often difficult to critically analyze a much-beloved artist, because the tendency is to excuse irksome traits or loathsome sonic detours simply because of past greatness. So while it’s tempting to give Morrissey a free pass for hauling in a children’s choir for several songs on his eighth solo studio…
Back in the early days of Mogwai’s career, an album titled Mr. Beast would have matched the band’s category-five noise hurricanes perfectly. But as the Scotsmen refined their sound over the next decade, moments of levity and clarity — airy synths, strings, eerie silences — made the band’s emotional maelstroms…
The Strokes were labeled the saviors of NYC’s rock and roll scene in 2001. But in the ensuing years, all the tricks that made the fab five so exciting — snappy hooks, drunken confessions of love/lust, and off-balance, VU-meets-AOR riffs — began to sound just as tired as the endless…
The Strokes First Impressions of Earth (RCA) The Strokes were labeled the saviors of NYC’s rock and roll scene in 2001. But in the ensuing years, all the tricks that made the fab five so exciting — snappy hooks, drunken confessions of love/lust, and off-balance, VU-meets-AOR riffs — began to…
“Hello, this is vocalist Justin Hawkins from the Darkness, here to talk about our amazing, fantastic, unbelievable second album, One Way Ticket to Hell … and Back. [pauses] What? You think the album is way more over-the-top than Permission to Land? You’d call it grossly self-indulgent, plodding in many places,…
On its major-label debut, Plans, Death Cab for Cutie captures flashbulb moments of melancholy — the dissolution of a summer romance, growing apart from a lover, being dumped by an egotistical jerk — with wrenching honesty. A solitary piano chord floats through the tear-inducing “What Sarah Said” as lyrics reveal…
Nine Inch Nails major-domo Trent Reznor has always seemed personally empowered by dispirited alienation. Though in hindsight his last album, 1999’s sprawling The Fragile, sounds like the embodiment of depression as a mental prison: unfocused and littered with frustrated and aimless expressions of confusion, anger, and uncertainty. It’s both a…
Although the duo of VV and Hotel of the Kills denied their romance ad nauseam in the aftermath of their debut, Keep on Your Mean Side, the bluesy garage crackling on the disc revealed an undeniably electric sexual spark between them. This intangible undercurrent is missing from their follow-up album,…
In 2004, the line between indie and mainstream rock disintegrated even faster than Britney Spears’s quickie Vegas marriage. Vinyl obsessives mingled with white-hat-wearing fratheads at Modest Mouse shows, Taking Back Sunday debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard charts, and Death Cab for Cutie earned O.C.-sanctioned buzz and a major-label…
There is nothing jokelike or reminiscent of Dungeons & Dragons about Coheed and Cambria’s pummeling meanderings through prog-emo, math rock, low-end skronk, and even hair metal — either onstage or on the band’s sophomore opus, In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3. The second installment of a planned trilogy, Secrets…
In a sense, More Adventurous is what Rilo Kiley has been building toward since the rickety country licks of 2001’s Take Offs and Landings and the sugar-spun indie-pop heartbreak of 2002’s The Execution of All Things. The L.A. band’s first disc on its own imprint is a startling modernization of…
Dear Chris Carrabba: Hi, this is Annie. Um, I feel kind of weird writing this letter to you. I interviewed you a few weeks ago, and I don’t normally do this kind of thing — violating the whole journalist/ subject, objective/distance thing, you know. However, I couldn’t help but scribble…
