The Killers’ ‘Sam’s Town’ and The Hold Steady’s ‘Boys and Girls in America,’ 10 Years Later

Craig Manning Oct 4, 2016

Between 2002 and 2009, Bruce Springsteen released five studio albums. Rather remarkably, that statistic made the aughts Springsteen’s most prolific decade ever. The Boss fired off four straight classics in the 1970s (Greetings from Asbury Park, The Wild, The Innocent, The E Street Shuffle, Born to Run, and Darkness on the Edge of Town) and put out four more in the 1980s (The River, Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A. and Tunnel of Love) before faltering in both quality and output in the 1990s. (The last decade of the millennium only saw Human Touch, Lucky Town, and The Ghost of Tom Joad, all of which are among Springsteen’s weakest LPs.)

The 2000s, though, brought the man back to life. Suddenly, Springsteen albums (and good ones) were a regular occurrence again. During the seven years that elapsed between 2002 and 2009, we got three E Street Band records (The Rising, Magic, and Working on a Dream), one acoustic album (Devils & Dust), and one tribute record (The Seeger Sessions). Four of those five records are worthwhile (Working on a Dream is the dud), and two are genuine classics (The Rising and Magic both recapture the…well, “magic” of the E Street Band’s golden age). However, there’s still an argument to be made that the three best Springsteen albums of the 2000s weren’t even written by Bruce, but by guys named Brandon, Craig, and Brian.

Always Summer: A Farewell to Yellowcard

Craig Manning Sep 29, 2016

The first time I heard Yellowcard was sometime in the summer of 2004. I think my sister and I were packing for our annual trip to visit my grandparents in New Hampshire and I had the radio on. (This event is notable because I can legitimately not remember the last time I had the radio on of my own accord.) I had my radio tuned to the local “modern rock” station, which played about 50% Staind and 50% everything else. They also had this feature called “the Buzzcut,” where they’d play an up-and-coming song from an up-and-coming band and ask listeners to call in with feedback. If listeners liked the song, it got added to the playlist. If they didn’t, it never got played again.

The Buzzcut song on this particular morning was “Ocean Avenue,” Yellowcard’s breakout hit single. At this point in time, the song was almost a year old, because it inexplicably wasn’t the lead single from the album of the same name. (More inexplicably, Capitol Records officially released “Ocean Avenue” as a single in February, the least appropriate month of entire year to be listening to “Ocean Avenue.”)

Review: Dawes – We’re All Gonna Die

Craig Manning Sep 16, 2016

I’m of the mind that no artist—band or solo—has had a more stellar run this decade than Dawes. After debuting in 2009 with the promising North Hills, the Los Angeles quartet fired off Nothing Is Wrong (2011), Stories Don’t End (2013), and All Your Favorite Bands (2015) in the space of just under four years. Not only are all of those records among the best of the decade so far, but they are also all markedly different from one another. Nothing Is Wrong is pitch-perfect Laurel Canyon folk rock, emulating Jackson Browne so successfully that Browne actually agreed to provide backing vocals on a track. Stories Don’t End took the band’s sound in a more modern, studio-driven pop direction, while last year’s All Your Favorite Bands was an Americana road trip of a record that returned the band to their live, improv-heavy roots. The latter features arguably the best playing of any rock album released since 2010.

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Review: John Mayer – Continuum

Craig Manning Sep 12, 2016

From the moment it was released, it seemed like John Mayer’s Continuum was poised to be a classic. That’s not because Mayer was particular respected at the time. Sure, Mayer hadn’t yet put his foot in his mouth by making stupid comments to interviewers. Still, though, the Berklee dropout turned pop sensation wasn’t exactly anyone’s first bet in the “guess who will have career longevity” game. It was obvious from early on that Mayer had chops, and equally obvious that he could write a damn sturdy pop song. (Listen to Room for Squares and tell me those tunes don’t still sound like hits.) But he was a teen pop icon first and foremost, and most of his songs seemed destined to become relics of early 2000s radio. You need only listen to “Your Body Is a Wonderland” once to realize how easily Mayer could have been a pop cultural punchline 10 years after the fact.

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Review: Butch Walker – Stay Gold

Craig Manning Aug 16, 2016

“I don’t know what to write about after this record. I’m saying it all. The well is tapped. Maybe no more albums after this one.”

Butch Walker tweeted those words in January of this year, stoking rumors that his then-still-untitled 2016 album might be his last. I don’t expect Walker to follow through with this particular threat. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from almost 12 years of holding Butch to be my favorite artist, it’s that the guy has an incredible, incessant love for music. He’s the kind of guy who would retire and then be antsy to get back into the studio after a month. If Stay Gold does end up being the last Butch Walker album, though, then it’s sure as shit the right kind of album to go out with. 2016 has been a dark year in a lot of ways, and just reading through the headlines these days is enough to make even the most sensible person want to stick their head in the sand. But Stay Gold is all brash guitars and sunny optimism, a quintessential summer record that stands as this year’s most celebratory work. Rarely has Butch’s love for music, lyrics, stories, and guitar solos been on such gleeful display. Frankly, this is the kind of life-affirming album we need right now. At least, it’s the one I needed.

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Review: Boys Like Girls – Boys Like Girls

Craig Manning Aug 15, 2016

10 years ago, it didn’t seem like Boys Like Girls were going to be a band anyone cared about a decade after the fact. Skyrocketed to success by Purevolume and Myspace, Boys Like Girls seemed inextricably tied to the mid-2000s even when they were just getting started. You need only look at some of the bands Boys Like Girls toured with in those early days (Cute is What We Aim For, Hit the Lights, A Thorn for Every Heart) to get a sense for what could have happened to BLG 10 years after the arrival of their debut record. Essentially, they’d have a handful of fans but not a ton of respect or clout, and they’d be cashing in on nostalgia more than pushing things forward in their music careers. Or they wouldn’t exist in any form. One of the two.

Review: Sarah Jarosz – Undercurrent

Craig Manning Jul 12, 2016

Texas Americana artist Sarah Jarosz is only 25 years old—and recently 25, to boot—but she already has four albums under her belt. Her third, 2013’s Build Me up from Bones, even earned a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album. It’s with her fourth album, the brand-new Undercurrent, that Jarosz is making a case for herself as one of the finest artists in the genre. On the last album I’d have argued that the best song was a cover of Bob Dylan’s timeless “Simple Twist of Fate”—already one of the best songs Dylan ever wrote. Here, all 11 songs are originals, and they showcase new depths of confidence for Jarosz. Even when she’s working with co-writers, everything on Undercurrent feels bent to the same artistic vision.

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Review: Dashboard Confessional – Dusk and Summer

Craig Manning Jun 27, 2016

Dusk and Summer is my favorite Dashboard Confessional album. How’s that for a contrarian statement? For most fans of Dashboard, Dusk tends to occupy the lower rungs of discography rankings—if not the very bottom slot. There are obvious reasons for this lowly reputation, and they happen to correspond with the various groups of Chris Carrabba fans that exist out in the wild. The first group of fans is the “there from the beginning” group. These people were listening when Carrabba first arrived on the scene and released The Swiss Army Romance (2000) and The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most (2001). Fans in this group are incredibly attached to the stripped-down acoustic arrangements and heart-on-the-sleeve angst of those first two records. They cite Swiss Army and Places as foundational albums in the emo and pop-punk movements, label them as classics, and point to Carrabba going full-band (on 2003’s A Mark, A Mission, a Brand, a Scar) as the moment where everything went to hell.

Review: Red Hot Chili Peppers – The Getaway

Craig Manning Jun 22, 2016

Sometimes with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, it’s best to think of Anthony Kiedis and his vocal lines as just another instrument in the mix. There’s at least a little bit of evidence that the frontman views himself that way, too. As New York Times journalist Nate Chinen wrote in his review of the Peppers’ new album, The Getaway, Kiedis “writes lyrics with rhythmic cadence first and foremost, which means that there will always be bursts of babble.” RHCP have always been a band whose foundation is rhythm, from their early days as a funk band to their transition into more conventional alt-rock territory with 1999’s Californication. With a rhythm section as talented and dynamic as Flea and Chad Smith, it’s tough to blame Kiedis for wanting to write lyrics that allow for better beat and syncopation. The negative consequence to that impulse is that Kiedis is very frequently singing lyrics that, while they might mean something to him, don’t carry much weight for the average listener.

Steven Hyden’s ‘Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me’

Craig Manning Jun 7, 2016

If you’ve ever told someone they’re a fucking moron for liking band X more than band Y, or for otherwise disagreeing with your obviously superior musical opinion, then Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me is the book for you. Written by Steven Hyden, a former contributor for Pitchfork, the AV Club, and Grantland (RIP), Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me is a thoroughly entertaining excavation of artist-versus-artist pissing contests. The subtitle says the book will teach us What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life. Hyden’s thesis is that, depending on which side you take in any given pop music war, your choice says something about you. Something like Oasis vs. Blur might seem pretty trivial for anyone who wasn’t actively paying attention to Britpop in the 1990s, but in the pages of Hyden’s book, these battles mean everything.

Review: Maren Morris – Hero

Craig Manning Jun 6, 2016

Often, country music is easy for the masses to ignore. Artists like Miranda Lambert and Eric Church are legitimately huge, but their appeal rests pretty squarely in the “Nashville” part of the radio dial. Every once in awhile, someone like Taylor Swift or Chris Stapleton comes along, lights the world on fire, and demands to be heard by everyone. For the most part, though, the people who claim to listen to “anything but country” can carry on without having to have their beliefs challenged by someone who is too big—and too fucking good—to ignore. I don’t know if Maren Morris is the next Taylor Swift or Chris Stapleton, but let me just say this: you aren’t going to want to sleep on Hero, Morris’s full-length debut.

Interview: Frank Turner

Craig Manning May 19, 2016

Frank Turner is about to return to the United States for another leg of the Positive Songs for Negative People tour. I got a chance to chat with Frank about how he feels about the album now that it’s been out for a little while, why his next record will be more “radical” and “experimental” than anything he’s ever done before, how Butch Walker ended up producing the album, why playing shows with Jason Isbell is a realization of a years-old dream, and how recording the mournful “Song for Josh” in a live setting almost made Turner, a “profoundly, sternly atheist man,” glimpse a higher power.

Review: Red Hot Chili Peppers – Stadium Arcadium

Craig Manning May 9, 2016

Why would any band ever release a double album? Serious question. The deck is stacked against you. Even the Beatles couldn’t do it without filler, and they were working in the days of vinyl. (Plus, you know, they were the Beatles.) What the hell do you have in your songbook that justifies two CDs of material? Calm down, go home, cut some tracks, and come back when you’re ready to be serious about making a cohesive work of musical art.

By all accounts, double albums are impossible. Even the acclaimed ones don’t escape the charge of filler, from Bruce Springsteen’s The River to The Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness. Let’s not even get into the kind of reputation that Foo Fighters’ In Your Honor has, or Arcade Fire’s Reflektor. And you can sure as hell bet that Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience and Green Day’s trilogy would have better legacies if they had been single-disc affairs.

Review: Parker Millsap – The Very Last Day

Craig Manning May 3, 2016

The country, Americana, and folk genres are known for their storytelling. Specifically, these genres are often recognized for taking microcosms and making them feel like the most important stories on the planet. On The Very Last Day, though, the third full-length album from Parker Millsap, the 23-year-old singer/songwriter is writing about nothing less than the end of the world. This album is a big, bold, and brash work—a record about apocalyptic wars, religious strife, the act of burning buildings to the ground, and plenty of death and rapture. The Devil, God, and Jesus Christ all make appearances. There’s a song about a soldier who comes home from war, feels forsaken by everything, and starts robbing gas station mini marts to make up for it. There’s another song about a preacher’s son falling in love with another man. Throughout, Millsap evangelizes from the front pulpit, his fire-and-brimstone roar hitting the balance somewhere between gospel and Led Zeppelin-flavored rock ‘n’ roll.

Noah Gundersen Live in Grand Rapids

Craig Manning Apr 26, 2016

Last Friday night I saw Noah Gundersen do something I’ve seen very few artists do: walk out onstage alone, with no backing band and no opening act, sit down in a chair, pick up an acoustic guitar, and start playing. He’d interact with the audience more—and make a surprising number of jokes—later in the show, but for now, he wanted to get right to the point: the music.

There’s something to be said for a concert with high production values. There’s something to be said for light shows and setlists where every moment has been meticulously planned — right down to the dialogue between songs. But there’s also something to be said for a show where an artist just comes out and acts like he’s playing songs in his living room. As someone who just made an entire album in his living room, that was something I appreciated about Noah’s show on Friday.