Review: Frank Turner – England, Keep My Bones

Frank Turner - England, Keep My Bones

There is nothing new I can say about Frank Turner that I didn’t say when I reviewed his Rock & Roll EP last year. In that review I laid out my thoughts about Turner, heavily praising him for his too-punk-for-punk-music brand of acoustic-ish folk rock. Even though I praised that EP for what it was, I can’t say it really revealed what listeners would be getting with Turner’s next record. England, Keep My Bones is Turner’s fourth full-length, and it is with no doubt or hesitation whatsoever that I gladly report this is his best record. England, Keep My Bones is 12 songs of Turner’s best lyricism, musicianship and energy all compiled into what will go down as his defining effort.

Turner’s lyrics have always been up-front and real, and opener “Eulogy” delivers on an ultra-personal level. It’s basically a short poem that lets him get something off his chest while serving as a disclaimer that England, Keep My Bones is the best he can offer: “Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut / Not everyone was born to be a king / Not everyone can be Freddy Mercury / Everyone can raise a glass and sing / Well I haven’t always been a perfect person / No, I haven’t done what mom and dad had dreamed / But on the day I die I’ll say, “Well at least I fucking tried” / That’s the only eulogy I need.”

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Review: Bruce Springsteen – Darkness on the Edge of Town

Bruce Springsteen - Darkness On The Edge Of Town

Following up Born To Run is something that seems like a monumental task, but given the pressure Bruce Springsteen experienced in earlier parts of his career, it probably didn’t seem like such a tall mountain to climb. When Springsteen released Born To Run, Columbia Records basically treated it as the 25-year-old’s last chance to write something that could make them some money. Luckily, Springsteen churned out one of the most fantastic records of all time, launching himself into stardom as a household name and a worldwide presence. Need further evidence as to his importance other than his extensive world touring after the record? On Oct. 27, 1975, both Time and Newsweek put Springsteen on their respective covers, with Time calling him “Rock’s New Sensation.”

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Review: Bruce Springsteen – Nebraska

Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska

Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 release Nebraska is probably the release that Columbia Records was looking for when they signed a young and unproven Springsteen in the early 1970s. Although the record came about a decade later and it was Springsteen’s sixth studio album, Columbia probably isn’t too disappointed with how the whole Springsteen experiment played out.

The story behind Nebraska is not one that is known very well outside of the Springsteen faithful. Basically, The Boss recorded demos of an album that he meant to record with the E Street Band on a 4-track at home. When he went into the studio and the entire band recorded the album, Springsteen and his producers felt it didn’t translate right. The end result was the actual releasing of the demos, as recorded on a 4-track in Springsteen’s home. Let The Boss tell you about it himself.

I got a little Teac four-track cassette machine, and I said, I’m gonna record these songs, and if they sound good with just me doin’ ’em, then I’ll teach ’em to the band. I could sing and play the guitar, and then I had two tracks to do somethin’ else, like overdub a guitar or add a harmony. It was just gonna be a demo. Then I had a little Echoplex that I mixed through, and that was it. And that was the tape that became the record. It’s amazing that it got there, ’cause I was carryin’ that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of week, just draggin’ it around. Finally, we realized, “Uh-oh, that’s the album.” Technically, it was difficult to get it on a disc. The stuff was recorded so strangely, the needle would read a lot of distortion and wouldn’t track in the wax. We almost had to release it as a cassette. [quote taken from a 1984 interview in Rolling Stone via the wonderful Wikipedia.]

I can’t even.

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Review: Bruce Springsteen – The River

Bruce Springsteen - The River

Unlike a couple of Bruce Springsteen’s previous records, The River can never be called a flawless effort. Arguments are made by some that Born To Run is a perfect work. With less fervor, people have called The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle or Darkness On The Edge Of Town perfect. I’m not going to argue the degree of perfection found in any Springsteen album. But with The River, a 20-song, 83-minute behemoth of a double-disc record, there are certainly flaws. But with those flaws came yet another sign of Springsteen’s musical genius that was the most captivating part of rock and roll in the 1970s and 80s.

Springsteen originally recorded 10 songs for a record called The Ties That Bind, and that record was going to be released in late 1979. Instead of releasing that, Springsteen went back to the drawing board and wrote some darker material after penning a song called “The River.” The result was the double-disc that saw light of day in the fall of 1980. While the record didn’t have the compact and straightforward storytelling themes of Born To Runand Darkness, it does feature some of Springsteen’s most compelling songwriting.

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Review: Bruce Springsteen – Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.

Bruce Springsteen - Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.

Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. is one of the two records that Bruce Springsteen released before he was Bruce Springsteen. At this point in his career, a 23-year-old Springsteen was not yet The Boss, but a singer/songwriter who Columbia Records signed with the hope that he would blossom into the next Bob Dylan. To say the least, Columbia was not pleased with Springsteen’s January 1973 debut full-length, as Greetings had no huge singles and proved to be much more rock’n’roll than Columbia had bargained for.

The record was received well by critics at the time of release, but Springsteen didn’t become America’s favorite rock star right away. Columbia released “Blinded By the Light” and “Spirit In the Night” as singles, but neither had any impact whatsoever on any charts. Most people only know “Blinded By the Light” because of the remake by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, and “Spirit By the Night” didn’t have the instant accessibility needed to become a regular number played on the radio. Considering the conditions under which the record was written, with Springsteen recording with producer/manager Mike Appel in one of the cheapest available studios in New York, it’s not much of a surprise that it only sold around 25,000 copies in its first year.

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Review: Bruce Springsteen – The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle

Bruce Springsteen - The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle

With Columbia Records disappointed at the result of Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., there was only one thing for Bruce Springsteen to do – give it another chance. So what did he do? He wrote, recorded and released an entire record in less than a year. Even lessthan less than a year, if that makes sense. Greetings was released on Jan. 5, 1973. The Wild, The Innocent& The E Street Shuffle came out barely seven months later – on Sep. 11, 1973.

Perhaps more impressive than the short turnaround is the quantum leap between the two records. Shuffle is more rock’n’roll while at the same time being more funky, the lyricism is improved to an exponential power, and it is the recorded debut of Springsteen’s E Street Band. An interesting point is that when Springsteen started off, he signed a contract with Columbia Records for Bruce Springsteen – no E Street Band existed for quite a while. Even on Shuffle, only three members of the E Street Band would continue on to work with The Boss for his entire career.

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Review: Bruce Springsteen – Live At Hammersmith Odeon, 1975

Bruce Springsteen - Live At Hammersmith Odeon, 1975

Next in the order of Bruce Springsteen’s studio records should be Darkness On The Edge Of Town. Rest assured, I’m not skipping Darkness, but I am skipping three other studio albums. Instead of doing reviews for The Ghost Of Tom Joad, Human Touch and Lucky Town, I am instead reviewing three live performances – Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75 (from the Born To Run 30th anniversary boxed set), Live In New York City ‘01 and London Calling. Since the Hammersmith Odeon concert happened in between Born to Run and Darkness, I’m just filing the review where it belongs in chronological order. The Darkness review will be up in next week’s batch.

If you read the last review in this series, about Born To Run, you probably noticed that I liked that record quite a bit. I wrote that I think it’s the best record of all time, so it should come as no surprise that I think Bruce Springsteen’s best touring days came after the release of that album. Many people subscribe to the opinion that Springsteen and The E Street Band were even more impressive after the release of Darkness On The Edge of Town, but I don’t think anything can compare to Springsteen’s performance at the Hammersmith Odeon in London in 1975.

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Review: Balance and Composure – Separation

Balance & Composure - Separation

It’s May. A lot of reviewers write during this month about those summer albums that will define the next few months for America’s youth: the sky-high vocals and enormous hooks that will erupt from car stereo systems and overflow out open windows and into hot and humid summer air. Balance & Composure’s first full-length record, Separation, doesn’t have those airy, lightweight melodies that normally accompany beach trips or patriotic fireworks displays. It does, however, have one extremely important intrinsic quality to it – it’s probably the best record released in 2011 so far.

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Review: Bruce Springsteen – Born To Run

Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run

Born To Run is the best album ever written. It contains within its eight tracks the two best rock and roll songs ever written and three other songs that are damn close. The album cover is the best album art ever put on a record. This review does not reflect my bias of Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, but rather my honest opinion about what I (and many others) consider to be the record that saved rock and roll music.

When a 25-year-old Springsteen released Born To Run in 1975, he was almost ready to hang up his hat on music. Columbia Records did not approve of the cult following that Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shufflecreated; they signed Springsteen with the very specific idea that he was going to sell as many records as Bob Dylan. They wanted his face on billboards on the highway, and they wanted his name on top of the Billboard singles charts every week. Springsteen has said that the only thing that made him write Born To Run was that he never wanted to have a 9-to-5 job in his life. In Dave Marsh’s biography of Springsteen, Marsh writes that Springsteen was finally going to call it quits if Born To Run didn’t succeed. Well, the record didn’t just succeed – it went down as one of the most important records ever released, and Springsteen filled an empty void as America’s beloved and adored rock and roll superstar.

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Interview: Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years

In the last year and a half, The Wonder Years have ridden their early 2010 release The Upsides to levels of attention they had never experienced before. That record helped them jump from the up-and-coming No Sleep Records to indie powerhouse Hopeless Records, exposed the group to new fans and got them credibility all over the globe. After roughly an entire year of touring, the six-piece Philadelphia pop-punkers took a month to record a follow-up full-length in Los Angeles with the legendary Steve Evetts. Announced earlier today, Suburbia I’ve Give You All And Now I’m Nothing will be released June 14 via Hopeless Records. Now we’ve got for you an exclusive interview with frontman Dan “Soupy” Campbell, where Soupy and I discuss the band’s current state, a big-picture look into the new record, the first song we’re exclusively streaming, and the band’s mindset going into the release of Suburbia. Much thanks to Soupy for taking the time to answer these questions, to Hopeless for letting us bring you this great exclusive, and to The Wonder Years and their entire team for being awesome people to work with.

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Review: Yellowcard – When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes

Yellowcard - When You're Through Thinking...

When Yellowcard announced its hiatus in 2008, the popular opinion was that the band was done for good. Listeners who felt as though they would never hear another record from the Jacksonville, Fla., five-piece pop-punk innovators were definitely not alone. While the band was only gone for just over two years ― not that long of a break in the grand scheme of things ― plenty of signs pointed to the conclusion that they were finished. Frontman Ryan Key started a new band called Big If, Longineu Parsons was drumming for other projects, and the other members of the group were strewn across the country each doing their own things. Capitol Records even came out with a weird four-track EP of previously released Yellowcard material entitled Deep Cuts.

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Review: Hellogoodbye – Would It Kill You?

Hellogoodbye - Would it Kill You?

Forrest Kline has perhaps outdone himself. Frontman for powerpop group Hellogoodbye, Kline was the genius behind the group’s 2006 debut full length Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs! That album sold over half a million copies and “Here (In Your Arms)” became a platinum single, so to outdo himself after that must have required quite the feat.

Would It Kill You? is that feat. The group’s new full length finds itself released near the end of an incredible year of music, but holds its own as one of the top releases in 2010. Undoubtedly the best poppy release this year, and probably one of the best of the last five years or so, Would It Kill You? is better than its predecessor in many ways.

But it seems almost unfair to compare the two albums because it’s almost as if two completely different bands wrote them. The difference is evident right from opener “Finding Something To Do”. Where there once was disco-esque electronics, there is an acoustic guitar. Where there once were autotuned vocals, there is now…erm…better normal vocals. Point is, this band has progressed about as much as any band can progress in four years. While not many can resist the nostalgia of songs like “Shimmy Shimmy Quarter Turn” and “Touchdown Turnaround”, the post-Drive Thru Records version of Hellogoodbye proves to be much more substantial.

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