Review: PUP – The Dream is Over

PUP - The Dream is Over

This first impression was originally posted as a live blog for supporters in our forums on April 30th, 2016. First impressions are meant to be quick, fun, initial impressions on an album or release as I listen to it for the first time. It’s a running commentary written while listening to an album — not a review. More like a diary of thoughts. This post has been lightly edited for structure and flow.

Ok, so it’s about 9pm on a Saturday, I’m mostly done with my tasks for the weekend, and I’m going to crack a beer and dive into this new PUP album for the first time. I thought it may be fun to write some thoughts down and kind of “live blog” the first listen. Maybe this won’t work very well, but I kinda wanna try it and see what shakes out. If it’s successful, and you all like it, I’ll try and do it again in the future for other albums.

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The Dark Side of Guardian Comments

The Guardian studied their online comments section, the results were harrowing:

The Guardian was not the only news site to turn comments on, nor has it been the only one to find that some of what is written “below the line” is crude, bigoted or just vile. On all news sites where comments appear, too often things are said to journalists and other readers that would be unimaginable face to face – the Guardian is no exception.

New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.

Cool New App: Talkshow

Apps

An interesting new app called Talkshow debuted this week:

Talkshow is a simple messaging app that allows you to text these things in public. With Talkshow, individuals, groups of friends, entertainers, creators — anyone! — can have conversations in public, to be viewed by others in real time or after the fact. Every Talkshow can be shared outside the app and embedded into other websites.

I can definitely see some interesting uses for this kind of thing.

Fuse Talk with Blink-182

Blink-182

Fuse sat down and talked with Blink-182 about their upcoming album, California. The band liked the other songs that didn’t make the album enough that they may save them for another album:

There weren’t any that we started where we were like, “No, that song’s not good.” Some were better than others, and obviously we put the best on the record, but we have so many more left over that we want to continue working on them and either use them for the next record or maybe do an EP.

They also discuss in more detail the title of the album and the themes found throughout:

It wasn’t a deliberate choice, but when we started writing lyrics and coming up with song titles, we were in the valley of Los Angeles. It was a perfect California winter, and it was sunny and hot every single day. John’s studio, it’s basically indoor-outdoor with palm trees everywhere. We were writing songs called “San Diego,” “Los Angeles,” “California,” and shouting out all these California punk-rock bands, lyrics to songs, and it just had this theme of California, this beautiful, endless opportunity with something weird or twisted underneath it. All the songs kind of have that. It’s a really catchy album, a really melodic album. There are all these hooks everywhere. It has an edge to it, a darker side. It just seemed like what California means to the three of us.

Prince’s Musical Vault Drilled Open

Prince

Prince’s vault has reportedly been drilled open:

The seven-time Grammy Award winner reportedly left behind a vault containing so much music his estate could put out an album a year for the next century. “We could put out more work in a month than most people could do in a year or more,” Susan Rogers, Prince’s former recording engineer, told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

New Blink-182 Album Will Go in Lots of Different Directions

Rolling Stone were at the kickoff “Karaoke Bash” for Blink-182’s new album and tour and the article has some new information peppered in.

“It goes in a lot of different directions,” says Hoppus. “We have some songs that sound like Blink-182 from 1999. … We have some songs that are like nothing we have ever done before. We have a ballad called ‘Home Is Such a Lonely Place’ that has clean arpeggiated finger-picking guitars with strings underneath it. We have super-fast late-Nineties-punk-rock-sounding songs. … We tried to capture the energy and not worry so much about all the knobs.”