Next week, Pianos Become the Teeth will release their fourth full-length, Wait for Love. It takes the band even further down the path their 2014 effort, Keep You, blazed and expands upon it, taking the band’s sound in totally new directions. I recently spoke with vocalist Kyle Durfey about the process of writing the album and following up such a radical change in sound.
Following on the heels of our look at the best music released in 2017, we have compiled a list of the albums we are most looking forward to in 2018. We may not know what the year has in store for us, but at least we can be assured of some great music coming our way. A bunch of contributors have written up blurbs about the albums and artists we’re most excited about, and we’d love to hear what you’re looking forward to as well.
On this week’s episode of Encore I am joined once again by special guest Craig Manning. This episode is all about our favorite albums of 2017. We talk about our personal lists, the staff list, the albums we loved the most, why, and the albums that didn’t make our list and shocked us. There’s also some talk about movies, tv shows, and books toward the end.
I asked everyone that contributed to our “best of 2017” list to pick a key track from the album they wrote about and then I compiled all of those tracks into a playlist on Apple Music and Spotify. Enjoy.
2017 was a frustrating, infuriating, and often heartbreaking year. From the politics to the abuses and scandals that trickled all the way down to our little music scene, it felt like every day had some scrap of bad news to serve up. It was a year where we really needed something to lean on and keep us resilient and resolute, and the artists featured on this list responded to that call of duty admirably.
The 25 records featured below are eclectic and far-reaching. Some are achingly personal reckonings with personal demons and mental illness. Others are scathing indictments of the political status quo. Some explore the cycle of getting older and losing your youth, while others revel in the excitement and confusion of being young. Some are pop records, while others are hip-hop or folk, country or post-hardcore, emo or classic-tinged rock ‘n’ roll. They are all distinctly different, but they all had at least one thing in common: for 30 or 40 or 50 minutes at a time, they all made 2017 feel a little more bearable.
So, without further ado, I give you Chorus.fm’s Top 25 Albums of 2017. In the words of one of the artists featured below, I hope you find something to love.
When “Sign of the Times” dropped last spring, the internet seemed to lose its collective mind. Was it because the highly anticipated previous solo offering from former One Directioner Zayn met with such a lukewarm critical reception last year? Was it because we were, in fact, living in the first days of our descent into an outdated political hellscape, not unlike the dystopian fiction that’s dominated the pop culture cycles for the past several years? Was it simply because Harry Styles is an undeniable force? Was it because it was just a great song? That answer to the “why” depends on whom one asks, but one thing is undeniable: the album that followed has peppered EOTY lists in a way other former Directioner offerings have not. Despite this, fellow former-Directioner Niall Horan quietly released an album in 2017, a largely acoustic, unexpected effort titled Flicker. And so followed the inevitable question – which was the better album?
It would be very easy to say the Styles record was superior and call it a day – after all, it’s flashy. It’s interesting. It was well written, well performed, and well produced – and it is inescapable. That makes it the easy answer. But as with so many things in life, I’m not convinced that the easy answer is necessarily the right one.
On this week’s episode of Encore I am joined by special guest Thomas Nassiff to talk about one of our favorite topics: Star Wars. This episode is full of spoilers all about Star Wars: The Last Jedi, so I would highly recommend you see the movie before listening. We give our thoughts on the film, break down favorite and least favorite scenes, and talk about catching up with favorite characters, both old and new. Also porgs.
I wanted to get this episode out before the holiday weekend so you’d have something to listen to while visiting family and friends. I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and a Merry Christmas, thank you to everyone who reads and supports this website on a daily basis. I truly appreciate it.
A new version of this page, with updated screenshots, can be found here.
It’s fitting that on release week for Star Wars: The Last Jedi I can bring the Dark Side to the main website. One of my favorite supporter perks in the forum has been Dark Mode — a dark slate colored theme — and I’m excited to be able to bring this color palette to the main website as well. I love our white, grey, and blue color scheme, but at night I almost always switch over to the dark theme while browsing the website on my phone. However, I’d often move over to the main site to read an article and the white contrast would be a rude awakening for my eyes. No more! Supporters can now activate Dark Mode on the main website via their supporter options page or in the forum preferences. If you’re not a supporter yet, join now to get Dark Mode.
I’ve included some screen shots below of what the website and forums look like in Dark Mode, for those curious. I think it maintains my main design goals: simple, clean, and focused on readability, while adding a new flavor to the overall feel of the website.
Read More “Join the Dark Side: Bringing Dark Mode to the Main Website”
Triple Crown Records has been putting out some of the scene’s most essential records for twenty years now, so it makes sense that their anniversary show ended up being one of the best shows I’ve seen this year. The four-band show had a mix of styles that spoke to the variance in sound the label has always had; a fan of almost any kind of music could’ve found a set to like. I ran through some of my favorites below.
Sleep On It are making winter fun again with their debut full-length Overexposed, which came out last month on Equal Vision Records. I recently sat down with the band to talk about their new album and their plans for 2018.
I can’t believe it’s already December, but here we are. Like last year, I wanted to steal an idea I’ve seen on other websites and put together a few gift ideas that I think are worthy of your time. I have also updated my recommendations posts for movies, tv shows, books, software, podcasts, headphones, and miscellaneous stuff around the house, so the things on this list will be more focused on stuff not included in those posts and more geared toward things I’ve come across in the past year or so and think would make good gifts. As always, I only recommend things I’ve personally used and loved.
I used my Amazon affiliate link when the product showed up there, which gives our website a slight percentage back if you make a purchase, and therefore helps fund our continued existence. I hope you’ll find something cool, and feel free to drop your own recommendations in the comments.
If you’d like to get me a gift, becoming a supporting member or gifting another user a supporting membership for a year would mean the world to me.
Waterparks are on the verge of something big. After spending the last year and a half climbing the ranks of the pop-punk scene with their debut Double Dare, the band is slated to release their follow-up, Entertainment, on January 26th via Equal Vision Records.
I recently sat down with the band’s lead singer, Awsten Knight, and he is careful and thoughtful in his responses to questions about his band’s sophomore effort. If you watch carefully, you can see that Knight doesn’t want to reveal too much too soon. Viewers can see his excitement bubbling just beneath the surface. He reveals that the band is trying new things; spicing things up with synthesizers and taking a step beyond their previous work.
Today I’m excited to announce I’ve completed the work on bridging our community and the main website’s supporter systems. Now, if you’re a supporting member of the forum community you can use your username and password to login on the content side of the website to view supporter only content (like my first impressions), manage your payment options, turn off advertisements site-wide, and soon gain access a special Dark Mode for the main website that matches perfectly with the Dark Mode of the forums.
And don’t forget: you don’t have to be a community member to be a supporter of the website! You can join right now for only $3 a month and help support this website and independent publishing. It’s because of readers like you that I can keep running this website. I can’t thank each and every one of you enough for your support over the past two years.
It’s funny how a project like this, which doesn’t end up having many outward facing changes, can be a massive undertaking behind the scenes. But now that it’s done, the foundation is better set for a bunch of cool things we can do in the future and the system is much more robust for handling payments and login credentials for our growing community.
If you are already a supporter, you don’t have to make any changes if you don’t want to, everything will just keep working as it has been. If you’d like to move away from PayPal and to the new credit card based system, you can do that here. Again, it’s totally optional to make that change if you want.
If anyone has any questions at all, feel free to drop me an email or message me in the forums.
Today we’ve got the premiere of You Vandal’s new album, I Just Want to Go Back to Hell, for your listening pleasure. The album is due out tomorrow, November 17th, but you can stream it right now below. If you like what you hear, pick it up over at Jump Start Records.
The album gives me a nice little power-pop/punk throwback sound, not unlike early The Ataris or New Found Glory. Catchy and breezy.
Read More “You Vandal – ‘I Just Want to Go Back to Hell’ (Album Premiere)”
Gleemer’s fourth full-length album, Anymore, comes out next month. It’s a big jump for the band, as it’s their first release on Other People Records – or, for that matter, any label. Last week I spoke with vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Corey Coffman about the jump to the label, the concept of Anymore, and the weird process of choosing its album cover.