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Month: October 2017

Fall Out Boy Are Still Confounding Haters by Refusing to Be Pigeonholed

Fall Out Boy
Jason Tate

Annie Zalesk, writing for Stereogum:

And make no mistake: Since Fall Out Boy returned from a nearly four-year hiatus in 2013, they’ve adapted quite well to the modern music landscape. The band has six RIAA-certified platinum singles, with three of these (“My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light ‘Em Up),” “Centuries” and “Uma Thurman”) certified multi-platinum. Their two most recent albums (2013’s Save Rock And Roll and 2015’s American Beauty / American Psycho) are also certified platinum, and they play outdoor sheds and arenas, something few formed-post-2000 modern rock bands attempt these days.

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President John F. Kennedy Files Released

John F Kennedy
Jason Tate

The National Archives have released 2,891 new documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The New York Times explains:

The papers were posted online by the National Archives and Records Administration around 7:30 p.m. Thursday in compliance with a 1992 law, and represent a treasure trove for investigators, historians and conspiracy theorists who have spent more than half a century searching for clues to what really happened in Dallas on that fateful day in 1963.

And:

“We’re not going to find some secret memo from J. Edgar Hoover drawing out the escape path for Lee Harvey Oswald,” he said. “The public expectations are very high — they’ve heard about secret files, they know they’ve been locked up for all these years. The average person may think there’s a bombshell in there.”

But Mr. Posner said the files might draw a fuller picture of the early 1960s beyond the specific questions about the assassination. “This is all about the Cold War and spooks and spies and Mexico City,” he said. “This is about a time when we know the government was in league with the mob to kill Castro. Cold War scholars and historians may find this as interesting as Kennedy assassination researchers.”

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Review: Weezer – Pacific Daydream

Aaron Mook

Over the span of nearly 25 years, Weezer have come to be known for a lot of things – frontman Rivers Cuomo’s absurdist lyrics, the goofy Beach Boy persona that seems to contradict his well-documented reclusiveness, a series of self-titled albums known by their respective color palettes – but staying in one place for long has never been one of those things. And so it is unsurprising following the relative critical success of 2014’s Everything Will Be Alright in the End and 2016’s Weezer (White Album) that Pacific Daydream is an inconsistent album by a band whose entire career could be defined by the very same word.

If Pacific Daydream doesn’t sound like the album fans expected, it’s likely because it wasn’t the album the band originally intended to deliver. Fans of Weezer (White Album) rejoiced when Cuomo spoke of a darker, more experimental follow-up, naturally titled Weezer (Black Album). But that same praise seemed to push the band in another direction as he soon began curating a different project. Pacific Daydream is still dark and, at times, experimental, but only in the sense that it occasionally sheds the quirks Weezer have become known for in favor of generic indie-pop largely targeting the same college radio stations inhabited by bands like Twenty One Pilots and Fitz and the Tantrums.

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