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Deryck Whibley Reflects on ‘All Killer, No Filler’

Sum 41
Jason Tate

Deryck Whibley of Sum 41 talks with Billboard about All Killer No Filler on its twenty years anniversary:

I’ve always felt somewhat, like, when that record had success — and maybe this is just my personality — but when it got as successful as it did, I had an immediate embarrassment. Almost like you become ashamed of your own success. In some way, I feel like it snuck through and everyone’s going to find out soon that it’s not that good. Like I sort of cheated my way, somehow. That’s kind of what I’ve always felt about that record. I think if I listen to it now as I’m older, maybe I can be a little bit more objective. But for the longest time, I thought it wasn’t a very good record.   

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Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

Jason Tate

Apple:

Apple today announced Apple Music is bringing industry-leading sound quality to subscribers with the addition of Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos. Spatial Audio gives artists the opportunity to create immersive audio experiences for their fans with true multidimensional sound and clarity. Apple Music subscribers will also be able to listen to more than 75 million songs in Lossless Audio — the way the artists created them in the studio. These new features will be available for Apple Music subscribers starting next month at no additional cost.

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Review: R.E.M. – Reveal

REM - Reveal
Mary Varvaris

It’s no secret that I wholeheartedly love R.E.M. I talk about them regularly on Twitter; I call myself a R.E.M. enthusiast on Instagram. By the time they released Reveal, 20 years ago this weekend, the band was already significant to my five-year-old self. I could take one look at the opening scene of the “Losing My Religion” music video and know the song was starting. The water drips from an open window; Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry run across the dark room while Michael Stipe stays seated; Tarsem Singh’s “melodramatic and very dreamlike” direction still captivates me. I loved that song while not understanding why I connected with it at such a young age. Maybe I loved it because my parents did, too. 

My parents didn’t follow R.E.M. in the 80s. Sure, they would have heard “It’s The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” – which dad hates – and “The One I Love” (which dad loves), but besides those two tracks, R.E.M. wasn’t breaking through in Australia. They didn’t hear “Fall on Me” on the radio, which is a travesty if you ask me. Life’s Rich Pageant – my favorite R.E.M. album, depending on the day – spent seven weeks on the Australian chart. A year later, in 1987, Document enjoyed nine weeks on the chart. Out of Time sat pretty for a whopping 33 weeks on the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Chart. Automatic for the People spent 52 weeks on the ARIA chart. By 1992, the band was rightfully inescapable in my home country.

Despite the wild success R.E.M. celebrated in their “peak” periods – for some, the peak is their run on IRS Records; for others, it’s the four-album run of Document, Green, Out of Time, and Automatic for the People – the band’s later output is criminally overlooked. If you look at pure sales and chart positions, they are among the most successful groups of all time. They are the college rock band that could. If you’re a Radiohead, Nirvana, or Pavement follower, you know the influence R.E.M. has had on them. Some people proclaim any album up to Automatic to be their last great album. If you’re one of those individuals, I have a couple of questions for you: Have you heard New Adventures in Hi-Fi? How about Up? Most importantly, have you sat and listened to Reveal?

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Review: Ours – Distorted Lullabies

Adam Grundy

A little known fact about Ours is that Distorted Lullabies is not actually their debut album. The band, led by multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Jimmy Gnecco, released their debut way back in 1994 called Sour, and disbanded for several years. Once Gnecco decided to get things up and running again in 1997, he would put the framework together for signing a major label record deal with Dreamworks Records and pair the band with veteran producer Steve Lillywhite (U2, Chris Cornell) to create the songs that would become Distorted Lullabies. I had the opportunity a few years back to check out Gnecco’s solo acoustic shows as he tried to get Ours back up and running full time and it was evident that he clearly still has the musical chops to take his music to the next level. During that particular performance, he told several stories of the early stages of Ours and how the label thought of them as “the next possible U2-caliber band to break out into the mainstream.” While the band did not experience the commercial success of the label’s lofty expectations, this record remains one of my favorites to come out during this time period, and I vividly remember discovering the band through their music video for “Sometimes,” that received semi-frequent airplay on MTV2. While the brooding, and darker-themed elements of their music may be remembered most during this era of the band, I’ll most remember that feeling of discovering my next favorite “underappreciated” artist.

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