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Month: June 2018
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Jason Tate

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Review: Mike Shinoda – Post Traumatic

Mike Shinoda
Adam Grundy

The circumstances behind Mike Shinoda’s debut solo album, Fort Minor not included, could have been more desirable. Shinoda’s longtime bandmate, and best friend, Chester Bennington lost his battle with depression and you can feel each and every emotion that goes along with the loss on the Post Traumatic LP. Previously, Shinoda had released the Post Traumatic EP, which has the opening three tracks from this album, only to later announce he was going to release a full-length album to help gain closure on Bennington’s untimely death.

Many of these intensely personal tracks are very hard to listen to, as they sound like pages ripped directly out of a private journal of someone who is devastated by the loss of a close friend. Shinoda does an excellent job of encompassing the wide spectrum of thoughts that go along with a sudden loss, and the depth that he goes into on this album on describing exactly what he is going through are simultaneously heartbreaking and remarkable at the same time.

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Review: Father John Misty – God’s Favorite Customer

Father John Misty - God's Favorite Customer
Drew Beringer

People often (mistakenly) interpret the Father John Misty persona as being cover for Josh Tillman to be some sort of “holier-than-thou” troll, thus missing the bigger picture on his third album, the 76-minute opus Pure Comedy. The follow-up to Comedy, however, is the polar opposite – God’s Favorite Customer is a concise ten track effort that clocks in under 40 minutes and peels back the Misty avatar to reveal a wounded, introspective Tillman. It takes courage to be this vulnerable – especially when Tillman has spent the last three albums examining and critiquing the world and culture around him. But on his fourth album under the Misty moniker, Tillman takes a step back from that macro view of everything around him and turned his gaze insular, resulting in the most heartbreaking record of 2018.

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Review: Steve Moakler – Born Ready

Born Ready
Craig Manning

Steve Moakler loves to sing for the everyman.

That’s what drove much of his last LP, last year’s stellar Steel Town. It was all over 2014’s almost-as-good Wide Open, especially songs like “Humble Operations” and “Rather Make a Living.” It was certainly there in “Riser,” the song that he and Travis Meadows wrote for Dierks Bentley back in 2014—and the song Bentley loved so much that he built an entire album around it. Like Bruce Springsteen, someone who has become an increasingly evident influence on Moakler’s music over the course of his last three albums, Moakler has a talent for finding beauty in unexpected, unglamorous places.

“Finding beauty in unexpected and unglamorous places” is more or less the mission statement of Born Ready, Moaker’s second album in 15 months. The title track and leadoff single is about long-haul truckers, while early highlight “Breaking New Ground” turns hard labor into a metaphor for perseverance and resilience. Even the album’s big love story song gets the title “One of the Boys,” underlining the everyman theme further.

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