Review: Give Me A Reason – Vice Versa

Adam Grundy Oct 26, 2020

The Swiss-based pop-punk band Give Me A Reason have created a solid debut record in Vice Versa. Produced by Blake Roses (Oh, Weatherly), the band comes storming onto the pop-punk scene with vibrant guitars, bouncy vocals, and solid songwriting. The band’s sound is reminiscent of early All Time Low, with a mix of Boys Like Girls and Cartel thrown into the mix. While the band doesn’t stray too far from their influences, the music that comes pouring through the speakers is undeniable ear candy.

Craig Manning Oct 23, 2020

At this point, you don’t get a Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band project without questions about it being the last one. That’s actually been the case for years: when Springsteen and company closed out their 1999-2000 reunion tour at Madison Square Garden with a special extended version of “Blood Brothers,” it felt remarkably final. Nine years later, when The Boss concluded the Working on a Dream tour with a full-circle performance of his debut album, 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, a common topic of conversation in the Springsteen fan community was about whether we’d ever get another E Street tour. The band came back in 2012—sans late sideman Clarence Clemons—for a tour supporting Springsteen’s then-new LP Wrecking Ball, and came back again in 2016 to play 1980’s double-LP masterpiece The River in full night after night. At the end of each tour, the question resurfaced: was this the last dance? The ensuing years only gave credence to the idea that it might be, as Springsteen penned his memoir, spent more than year on Broadway, and circled back to old songs for last year’s solo Western Stars. Each of these projects was wrought with ruminations about fading youth, aging, and mortality. Bruce wrote and spoke extensively about Clemons, whose death in 2011 clearly shook him to the core. On Stars, he closed the album with “Moonlight Motel,” his most aching look back at the past, and at the little glories of youthful freedom and young love that can’t quite ever be replicated or recaptured.

Mia Hughes Oct 23, 2020

If there’s anything Brooklyn-based band The Big Easy can count on as they release their debut record A Long Year, it’s that there’s probably absolutely nobody with whom that title isn’t gonna resonate. The end of 2020 is in reach now, and while, sure, in some ways it feels like the start of it was only two weeks ago, it also feels like it was a thousand years ago. A pandemic, the ever-growing creep of fascism, however many personal battles we all may have had, and all before whatever is to come on election day; it’s been a long, scary, exhausting and often hopeless year. To state the obvious, we live in a very different world now than we did back on January 1^st.

A Long Year was penned in that old world, and it sounds like a time that’s gone now, if hopefully temporarily. This is raucous, beer-soaked, dive bar punk. This is being jammed into a tight space with strangers and feeling the spray of sweat and spit like it’s ocean mist and not a potential death sentence. Remember that? It sounds kinda horrifying now, but also like to just experience that one more time would be some kind of salvation.

Craig Manning Oct 22, 2020

Speak Now is the most pivotal album in the Taylor Swift discography. It’s not the one that started the story (2006’s self-titled debut) or the one that made her a global superstar (2008’s Fearless), nor is it her biggest album (2014’s 1989) or her straight-up best (2012’s Red). But it was on Speak Now where Swift took full control of her creative enterprise, came into her own as a songwriter, and established many of the key elements that would ground her career for the next decade. It also might be the album that, more than any other, sets the table for the next 10 years of country music, from the pop influences to the confessional style of songwriting. It is, in a word, a landmark.

Swift, unlike many mainstream country stars, was always a songwriter first and foremost. Her debut self-titled record dropped when she was just 16 years old, but she still had writing credits on all 11 songs (and wrote three of them solo, including the number-one country smash “Our Song”). On Fearless, she more than doubled that number, taking solo writing credits on seven of the 13 songs (including “Love Story,” which briefly became the best-selling country single of all time). Still, Swift racked up a lot of co-writes on those first two albums, particularly with veteran Nashville songwriter Liz Rose, who has 12 writing credits across Taylor Swift and Fearless. On Speak Now, the big selling point isn’t that it’s a concept album about wild romance and dramatic heartbreak (Red), or a leap into pop (1989), or a rejoinder to her haters (Reputation), or her “indie” record (folklore). No, the big selling point here is the simple fact that Swift wrote all 14 tracks by herself.

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Review: The Struts – Strange Days

Adam Grundy Oct 20, 2020

The circumstances surrounding The Struts third album, Strange Days, were unique, to say the least. The band had just come off the success of two popular records and had established themselves as one of the “must-see” live acts coming up in the music ranks. The Struts, who had not been together since February, all got COVID-19 tests before moving into producer Jon Levine’s home for the ambitious task of recording a new album in just ten days. The result was a collection of ten songs that include a ton of A-list collaborators in Albert Hammond Jr (The Strokes), Robbie Williams, Tom Morello, and Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott & Phil Collen. The material that the band was able to come up with under the pressure of a deadline still lives up to the hype of their earlier material and plays out like a love letter to the glam rock of the ’70s.

Adam Grundy Oct 16, 2020

After releasing three albums firmly planted in the pop-punk genre Seaway were ready to try something new with their sound. Their fourth album, Big Vibe, takes a stab at 80’s style pop rock filled with big sing along choruses and crowd pleasing hooks. Released under their longtime label in Pure Noise Records, the record’s timing in the fall season seems a little curious, as the sound that comes through the speakers is fully entrenched with summer vibes. The benefit of releasing shimmering music during the rain-soaked season of autumn is to have some new tunes to brighten up our outlook on life and what comes next. Seaway have created their best record to date on Big Vibe, and the band seems poised to take the next big step in their quest for world domination.

Adam Grundy Oct 15, 2020

Fresh off the success of his debut EP, Hydroplane that featured a hit single called “Ghost,” Kulick has released his proper full-length record called Yelling in a Quiet Neighborhood. The 28-year old singer songwriter from West Penn, Pennsylvania is poised for some breakout success with this collection of deeply personal songs. In regards to the material translating to the live setting, Kulick mentioned in a recent interview that, “I am ready to tour as soon as it is safe to. I miss my friends and everyone who shares these songs with me. I miss their energy. When we’re able to tour again, look forward to hearing the first record that is truly a Kulick record. I look forward to sharing it with everyone.” It’s easy to share the optimism that he has in respect to his debut album, as he has crafted a unique brand of songs filled with personality.

Jason Tate Oct 14, 2020

First of all, thank you to everyone for the massive feedback from last week’s article about dealing with the collapsing ad market due to the pandemic. All of the kind words made a time of uncertainty a little more bearable, and it was the best week of membership signups we’ve had since the first week I launched the website. Everything is still very much up in the air, but the last week gave me a feeling of comfort I haven’t had in a few months, so thank you for that.

While I was putting together the “Back to” and “My Nostalgia” series, I tried to capture as many of the significant memories as I could about the years and, specifically, the music. However, as I finished, I realized something was missing. While I felt good about documenting the music and what was going on behind the scenes of running the website, I couldn’t pull in as many of the other random anecdotes or bigger things that were happening around the website and our community through those years. Various moments stand out to me, usually related to a dramatic event, that felt almost as memorable as the music itself. This week I’d like to reminisce about five of them. I don’t always remember the specifics of the years and timing, but I’ll try and pull in what I can track down.

Adam Grundy Oct 12, 2020

It feels great to have Madina Lake back in the fold. With their first taste of new music since 2011, The Beginning of New Endings is an aptly titled EP as the band starts the latest chapter in their discography. Madina Lake came up through the Warped Tour scene in the latter part of the 00’s decade and released three fairly solid LPs along the way. When the group disbanded in September 2013, many people thought we had heard the last from the Chicago-based rock band. The Leone brothers announced their reunion in 2017, added a new drummer in Chris Mason, and re-connected with their longtime guitarist Mateo Camargo to complete their comeback. Madina Lake has come back stronger than ever with an EP that lives up to the legacy of their earlier work.

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A Message From Jason; Because He Has No Other Title Ideas

Jason Tate Oct 7, 2020

Years from now, I’m not sure I’ll be able to adequately explain to someone that didn’t live through 2020 precisely what it was like. It’s been a year unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime. Things I never thought I’d see are happening on such a regular basis that I feel myself fluctuating between numb anxiety and flashing white-hot anger. When the pandemic began in March, I reacted by tackling some projects I had on my list for a long time. I redesigned and rebuilt the entire main website and launched that in May; I then brought back hundreds of pieces of old AbsolutePunk content and got that part of the scene history back in our database. Over the past eighteen or so weeks, I’ve also been writing weekly articles that first re-ranked all of the “best of” lists from 2005 through 2015, and then deconstructed my entire musical journey starting in 1998 and tried to tell the story of how I fell in love with music and the history of beginning AbsolutePunk. These have been welcome distractions in these weird-ass times.

Usually, in August, I do some kind of “supporter pitch” on the website. I’ve done it the past three or four years to remind people about our membership program and talk about how it’s because of the supporting members that this website can exist. I try not to be too annoying about this because I’m not great at self-promotion, but if I don’t do it, I always feel like I’m not trying as hard as I could be. This year, with all of the racial injustice, pandemic, and so much more going on, I never could find the time that felt right to do it. After finishing my article project last week, I spent some time brainstorming what other kinds of articles I could write that I think would be fun to tackle, and I also did my annual deep dive on the state of the website and how I’m feeling about everything. The bottom line is the pandemic really fucked with my plans.

From the end of March through this month, on average, the website’s ad revenue was basically cut in half. We saw more traffic than usual, and virtually half the income from the ads. That’s not great. I don’t know if, or when, the ad revenue will return to something resembling what it looked like at the beginning of the year. So I realized before I can start thinking about my next article series, I have to write up some pitch about our membership program. So here I am.

Adam Grundy Oct 6, 2020

On the latest EP from Luna Aura, she explores the female identity and the relationship to American culture and society. Three Cheers for the American Beauty is a hard-hitting record that leaves you wondering whether it’s time to dance, take notice, or join her army of followers. With the pompous stomp of electronica acts such as NIN, to the riot girl approach of bands such as Hole and Garbage, Luna Aura is starting to emerge as a true artist to watch as the year unfolds. With a voice that is equally sweet as it is powerful, she tackles an array of topics on this record that hits its mark more often than not.

Brett Bodner Oct 5, 2020

I have to be honest with you. I’m not that familiar with Machine Gun Kelly’s music. Prior to this album, all I knew about the 30-year-old rapper a.k.a. Colson Baker, was that he once had a beef with Eminem, he played Tommy Lee in the Motley Crue biopic “The Dirt” and had a song called “I Think I’m Okay” he made with Yungblud and Travis Barker. When I heard Barker was working with Machine Gun Kelly on a pop-punk project, I raised my eyebrow like The Rock and assumed it was probably something I wouldn’t listen to. Then I heard “Bloody Valentine.”

“Bloody Valentine” has been stuck in my head, in my head, since the first moment I heard it in May. I’ve long been a fan of pop-punk, and this song was right up my alley, taking me back to a time when the genre was at its highest of highs in the early 2000s. “Bloody Valentine” left me wanting more, and suddenly MGK’s new album, Tickets To My Downfall, was one of my most anticipated albums for the fall. When it finally arrived on Sept. 25 after being delayed in the spring thanks to COVID, it completely exceeded my expectations and left me feeling like I was 12 again, when I would listen to Good Charlotte’s The Young and the Hopeless and Blink-182’s Take Off Your Pants and Jacket on repeat.

Jason Tate Oct 1, 2020

How does our music scene follow-up a year like 2003? With many of the bands that had released breakout albums the previous couple of years coming back for seconds. We’re at a spot where this music scene is riding a wave. Blink-182 helped bring pop-punk into the mainstream, and bands like New Found Glory, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, Sum 41, and Yellowcard are spearheading the next wave. 2004 is where New Found Glory drop Catalyst, Sum 41 return with Chuck, Jimmy Eat World tears us open with Futures, and Green Day takes back the crown with the massive American Idiot. And it’s the year where a bunch of new artists appear in our lives. We’ll see Straylight Run, Name Taken, The Spill Canvas, and Northstar all release albums that captivate the community. We’ll get Underoath’s They’re Only Chasing Safety and an extremely polarizing Taking Back Sunday record.1

2004 marks the spot where I wrap up this My Nostalgia series. I started in 1998, and the Back To series began in 2005. So, 2004 is the crossroads. It’s everything that led into that next crest of bands that so many of you reading grew up with. It’s where AbsolutePunk undeniably took off to new levels and my life shifts from this website being a project I was doing for fun, into something I will dedicate the next 15 years of my life to.

Let’s head back. It’s 2004. This is the period of my junior year of college and a little bit of my senior year. I’m growing frustrated with classes. I’ve changed my major to business, and yet the classes run from seemingly obvious (marketing) to things I definitely don’t want to ever do (accounting), and what I want to be doing (working on AbsolutePunk) is squeezed in between all of the regular college things. Except, this year, there’s one little tweak. A bunch of my close college friends, including my roommate from the previous two years, will study abroad for a semester. Most of them are going to Salzburg. For a brief moment, I think I’m going too; I even get a passport. But then I find out that the house we’d all be staying at gets very weak, at best, internet. While the website is beginning to blow up, I’d have to, in many ways, put a pause on it for a semester to get the full experience of studying abroad. I decide I can’t do it.2 So now I’m back at school, and most of the people I spent the previous two years with aren’t there. I’m living off-campus in an apartment with some people I only knew tangentially from the earlier years. I spend most of the time at my girlfriend’s apartment with her roommate and her roommate’s boyfriend. But it doesn’t feel the same. I’m wandering. I’m feeling restless. I’m feeling trapped in a rut. Everyone around me is stressed about trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives, and I feel like I have the answer but not the time to commit to it. I start thinking about just dropping out of college to work on the website full time. It’s making some money; I could get a part-time job, maybe even keep living somewhere around the campus and hang out with my friends? When my girlfriend at the time decides she’s going to go abroad the next semester, I see an opening. I propose to my parents that I take the next semester off.

They flip their shit.

Lasers anyone?↩
I sometimes ask myself if I regret this decision, and I don’t think I do, even if I wish I had those memories with my friends. I still see their pictures and think about what might have been.↩

‘Kid A’ 20 Years Later: Why Radiohead’s Masterpiece Still Matters

Mary Varvaris Oct 1, 2020

20 years ago, Radiohead released an album that encapsulated an experimental fusion of cacophonous jazz (“The National Anthem”), ambient music (“Treefingers”), “traditional” rock moments (“Optimistic”), and electronic music (the rest). Kid A was unveiled during a moment in time that demanded heated discussion, introspection, and patience. With patience comes great reward: to understand the album the way it was intended opens up a whole new world. The record also immediately cast a behemoth-sized shadow over what Radiohead had done before (yep, even OK Computer) and what would come after (In Rainbows, too).

Singer Thom Yorke found himself exhausted with burnout following a lengthy tour of OK Computer. He began to despise everything about “rock music” as we knew it – guitars, the glamorization of drug and alcohol addiction – and his vision of what “rock” music could be would inadvertently change the music industry and online music culture for decades to come. For many Gen X-ers, Kid A was one of the earliest albums experienced online. Pre-streaming era, over 1,000 websites posted Kid A and it was streamed over 400,000 times, three weeks before the album’s release. There was no promotion – no music videos, the band declined to do interviews – but that didn’t stop incessant arguments on whether the album was Radiohead’s magnum opus or hot garbage, nor did it stop the reviews coming.

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Review: Guardrail – Yikes

Adam Grundy Sep 29, 2020

The Chicago-based band Guardrail has self-described themselves as “Diet Punk” since they are heavily influenced by punk bands, yet their sound doesn’t stray too far into that genre. Lucky for them, genre lines continue to get blurred in today’s scene and it matters very little what category a band gets placed in as long as they continue to write good music. The band is comprised of Kevin Andrew (vocals), Ken Ugel (guitar), Alyssa Laessig (bass, vocals), and Doug Brand (drums) who each bring their own strengths directly back into their sound. Guardrail reminds me of the melodic, guitar-driven rock of bands such as Autopilot Off, The Bouncing Souls, and Fenix TX. Comparisons aside, they have delivered a well-crafted new EP called Yikes that directly examines the pitfalls of growing up.

Review: Give Me A Reason – Vice Versa

Review: Bruce Springsteen – Letter to You

Review: The Big Easy – A Long Year

Review: Taylor Swift – Speak Now

Review: The Struts – Strange Days

Review: Seaway – Big Vibe

Review: Kulick – Yelling in a Quiet Neighborhood

The Biggest Memories Are Always Chaos

Review: Madina Lake – The Beginning of New Endings

A Message From Jason; Because He Has No Other Title Ideas

Review: Luna Aura – Three Cheers for the American Beauty

Review: Machine Gun Kelly – Tickets To My Downfall

My Nostalgia – 2004

‘Kid A’ 20 Years Later: Why Radiohead’s Masterpiece Still Matters

Review: Guardrail – Yikes