Interview: Brian McTernan of Be Well

Be Well

Recently I had a chance to talk with Brian McTernan (producer, vocalist) of Be Well. McTernan has a storied past of producing legendary records from bands such as Thrice (Illusion of Safety, The Artist in the Ambulance), The Movielife (Forty Hour Train Back to Penn), and Senses Fail (Still Searching, Life is Not a Waiting Room). These are just a few of the many producer credits to McTernan’s name, and we discussed his process for producing bands as well the advice he would give to young producers looking to make their unique stamp on an album. Not to be lost in the shuffle, Brian McTernan also released a solid album from a project called Be Well this past summer, and he shared his favorite tracks from The Weight and The Cost, and what he’s most looking forward to once its safe to tour again.

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Sponsor: Teo & The Cosmic Neighborhood to Release New Album Friday

Teo

Teo & The Cosmic Neighborhood will release their new album, Fora do Azul, this Friday, February 5th. Today they would love to share with you the new song “Clutter” from the album.

The brainchild of Mateus “Teo” Cesareo, Teo & the Cosmic Neighborhood is a collaborative, cross-cultural musical/visual band centered on the concepts of community and imagination, as indicated by the band’s name. The band’s new song, “Clutter,” is about using the messes life hands you to keep moving forward. It’s off their debut album Fora do Azul (“Out of the Blue” in Brazilian Portuguese) on Feb 5th, 2021. Fora do Azul attempts to translate Teo’s Afro-Brazilian roots into a contemporary, indie pop/rock package that illustrates their expansive and open-minded outlook on life.

The album is available for pre-order on Bandcamp.

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Review: Weezer – OK Human

Weezer - Ok Human

Rivers Cuomo is a popstar. It’s an interesting revelation considering the Weezer frontman has spent the better half of the last 25 years chasing mainstream recognition (something the band has had since releasing their first single, “Undone – The Sweater Song” in 1994), but for as many times as he’s turned his band into a modern pop-rock experiment and apologized for it on the very next album, Cuomo continues to craft unbelievable earworms, whether he’s utilizing a team of co-writers and producers or simply his strat with the lightning strap.

To understand and accept this is to be a Weezer fan. Just as it’s been noted that the singular band has essentially split into two — one putting out weird records while the other puts out, well, Weezer records — fans can rarely know what to expect when they hear new music is coming, even when it’s been described to them beforehand. Put simply, we’ve been burned before, and we’re all ready to feel like clowns the day after a new single drops and it sounds closer to Twenty One Pilots than the band that wrote “Keep Fishin’.” Still, we have a reason to be excited; it seems that the plastic, filler-ridden mid-career crisis that plagued the band in the late 2000s is over. Since 2014’s Everything Will Be Alright in the End, the band has (more or less) released consistent albums that, at the very least, keep Weezer fans guessing. While they still jet back and forth between pop-rock and expertly executed power-pop, there’s energy once again present that seemed to disappear somewhere around 2007’s self-titled red album. Weezer seem invested in the music they’re making (having averaged a new album each year since 2014), and more importantly, the records they’re making feel like Weezer records – even the weird ones. For my money, their latest is the closest the band has come to merging those two lanes; OK Human is a left-field masterpiece that comes dangerously close to reaching the heights of the band’s early career.

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Morgan Wallen Tops the Charts (Again)

Morgan Wallen still has the number one album in the country:

Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album stays put at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for a third straight week, becoming the first country album to spend three weeks atop the list in eight years. The set earned 130,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in the week ending Jan. 28 (down 18%), according to MRC Data.