Review: Wild Once – We Did It Anyway

Adam Grundy Aug 18, 2020

The sophomore EP from Buffalo, New York emo-rockers Wild Once expands upon their ideas they tinkered with on their debut, with mostly favorable results. Much like their debut, Perennials, their heart on their sleeve lyrics mesh well with the indie rock sound brought forth by the four-piece band. Led by vocalist/guitarist Tom Mayer, his prominent take on songwriting makes for an overall enjoyable listening experience. Wild Once is rounded out by guitarist Anthony Granica, bassist Jay Fritzius, and drummer Matt Bratcher, and each of these musicians brings plenty to the table. We Did It Anyway was recorded in late 2019 with producer Jay Zubricki (Every Time I Die, Beach Slang), but due to the on-going pandemic, they mostly shelved the promotion cycle of this EP until quietly releasing it for their fans this past Friday. This collection of five songs mesh well together and showcase the improvements of the band as they move forward in their career.

Kevin Stevens Aug 17, 2020

After two full-length albums and an EP, Gleemer have crafted a unique aesthetic. There’s a reason people simply tweet “gleemer” and fans get it: the band’s name is as much evocative of a sound—the glistening guitars that brighten the group’s otherwise dark, ruminative songs—as it is a visual style—nocturnal, impressionistic portraits, where, again, glimpses of brightness color an otherwise darkened image. On Down Through, Gleemer does not stray from this style, producing another, well, gleemery record—a series of night-dwelling songs saturated in gauzy static and laden with anxiety. This album both feels and sounds heavy, befitting this pandemic summer’s unrelenting humidity and pervasive sense of dread. For these reasons, Down Through can be both an exhilarating and exhausting listen.

Adam Grundy Aug 13, 2020

Anytime we can get new music from Acceptance it feels like a treat. Having waited for over ten years between full-length albums in Phantoms and Colliding by Design, the fact that the band is releasing new tunes semi-regularly now feels almost surreal. The Wild EP couldn’t have come at a better time, as 2020 has left us wondering what else could go wrong in the world around us. This particular record covers some new territory for the band as they have regained a lot of the momentum that was lost during their hiatus, and they pick up right where they left off from their last LP. Whereas Colliding By Design reintroduced their band to the world, Wild showcases what Acceptance are capable of creating when the pressure is on them to deliver.

Jason Tate Aug 12, 2020

2015 was the final full year of AbsolutePunk. Looking back at the staff list from this year, I’m filled with many conflicting feelings. On the one hand, there’s a whole lot of outstanding music from this year that I hold fondly in my memory. That Sufjan Stevens album, Kendrick Lamar, Foxing, Noah Gundersen, Carly Rae Jepsen, Fall Out Boy, and many others continue to get regular spin in my rotation. But at the same time, 2015 was the year I knew, beyond any doubt, that I needed to change something in my life.

Beyond the abject chaos of working for a large corporation spending money in the weirdest ways and having shakeups in management seemingly every week, this was a year where the music scene itself, and AbsolutePunk in particular, became a nightmare I dreaded being a part of. This is the year where the tour manager for The Wonder Years lies to me to cover up sexual assault from some dude in some crappy band on Pure Noise Records. This is the year where Front Porch Step is allowed to play Warped Tour after allegations of misconduct. The year where I’m getting in public and private spats with bands that are doing gross shit. I’m getting messages from record labels that don’t want me to write about any of this and want to cover for it as “boys will be boys.” And there was even that whole thing with Kevin Lyman himself wanting me to come out to some Warped Tour date, and when I suggested multiple women he should be talking to instead, he just said “no.”1

And, for the record, as all the stories that have come out since detail: we were absolutely right in describing the toxic environment of that tour.↩

Interview: Alex Basovskiy of Only Sibling

Adam Grundy Aug 10, 2020

A couple weeks ago I was able to chat with Alex Basovskiy (Vocalist/Guitarist) of a new band called Only Sibling. We talked about his band’s new album Get Well Soon, the struggles of promoting a new record during a pandemic, unique memories from the recording process of the LP, and what fans can expect from the band when they’re able to get back on the road. Get Well Soon will be available everywhere music is sold this Friday via Other People Records.

Craig Manning Aug 5, 2020

Once upon a time, I had a lot more time to write about music than I do now!

In 2013, about a year after I joined the staff at AbsolutePunk, I decided I’d take on a project called “Butch Walker Week.” The basic idea was that I’d go back and write about every Butch album, from the records with his former band Marvelous 3 up to his solo output, in the week leading up to his then-new EP Peachtree Battle. That project ended up running 11 reviews and about 16,000 words of text.

When Jason started reviving old AbsolutePunk content to post here on Chorus, I knew I wanted to resurrect this feature. Butch Walker has been one of the absolute constants in my musical evolution for the past 15 years. Getting to write about all his records back then was super fulfilling (and even earned some Twitter recognition from the man himself). Reading back through these reviews reminded me how much these albums meant to me (and how much they continue to mean to me now). So whether you’re familiar with Butch’s work or just thinking about listening to him for the first time, I hope you’ll give these old write-ups a look!

Jason Tate Aug 5, 2020

This week has us traveling back to 2014. Only one more week left after this, and we will be caught up with when Chorus launched in 2016. These last few weeks have an interesting feel to them, they’re far enough away where there’s a distance, but six years is still close enough where it doesn’t feel as much like the past as the previous dives.

Looking at AbsolutePunk’s 2014 list fills me with a wide range of emotions. The year itself, for music, is one that I’ll always hold dear. I loved that Noah Gundersen record. Taylor Swift released 1989 and was starting to cement herself as the artist of a generation. Bleachers released their debut. Copeland were back. Against Me! dropped an all-time classic. The Gaslight Anthem were polarizing. And a new group of bands were starting to make waves. From Joyce Manor, to PUP, to Modern Baseball, to The Hotelier cementing themselves as one of the ‘next great bands in our scene.’ And I’m also thinking back to 2014 and all the turmoil that was taking place not just in the scene but also in the AbsolutePunk offices. Drew Beringer had a fun little rant in the forums last week about being hired at the Spin office and the cluster fuck of mismanagement and organizational failures. This was, for lack of a more colorful phrase, the beginning of the end. I had an entire new version of the website designed, built, and coded, and I couldn’t get it launched. It was then that I gave up fighting the battles. I couldn’t even keep track of who was in charge anymore, or who was running what, so I went into “put the head down, do the work” mode. And the joy of something I had been doing since I was a teenager was sucked completely out of each day of work. I went through the motions and started daydreaming about what my next steps were going to be.

Mary Varvaris Aug 5, 2020

Alanis Morissette needs no introduction, but she deserves one. At 21 years old, her breakthrough album, Jagged Little Pill sold 33 million copies worldwide, was nominated for nine Grammy Awards, winning five (including Album of the Year), and it’s one of the best-selling albums of all time. The singles are magnificent – each a warranted choice for best song on the album. Whether you were a year old in 1995, 13-years-old or pushing 30, “You Oughta Know” and “Ironic” were inescapable. Most astounding of all, Morissette channeled unflinching female rage in a fashion that was unheard of in mainstream music at the time. She also didn’t dream about growing older – she had one hand in her pocket, and the other one “giving a high five,” “flicking a cigarette,” and “hailing a taxi cab.” She effectively became the voice of a generation overnight – a voice for those who never expressed their desires, their fears, or their anger.

In many ways, Morissette’s ninth album — her first album in eight years — Such Pretty Forks in the Road, feels like a love letter to her many past selves. Originally written for the 2018 Jagged Little Pill musical, opener “Smiling” calls back to the drama of “Uninvited,” as well as the Radiohead classic, “My Iron Lung,” echoing Jonny Greenwood’s descending guitar notes; only quieter. “Smiling” also paves the way for the rest of the album: she’s back, and she’s more confessional than ever.

Craig Manning Aug 3, 2020

When Arcade Fire won the Album of the Year Grammy for The Suburbs on February 13, 2011, it was legitimately shocking. Sure, the Grammys, as an institution, are known for weird out-of-left-field choices, particularly in the Album of the Year category, where the favorites (either odds-wise or in terms of public or critical sentiment) regularly lose to something a bit more sentimental (think Green Day, Usher, Alicia Keys, and Kanye West all losing to the late Ray Charles in 2005) or maybe just a bit more white (Beyonce’s self-titled smash losing to an unexceptional late-career Beck album in 2015). But The Suburbs was different. There was no precedent for an indie band taking the top prize. A band hadn’t won the award period since U2 and Dixie Chicks won back-to-back in 2006 and 2007. The other contenders were also all gargantuan albums that had spawned at least one ubiquitous, generational hit: Katy Petty’s Teenage Dream, Eminem’s Recovery, Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster, Lady Antebellum’s Need You Now. Arcade Fire weren’t nobodies: they’d made arguably the second most acclaimed album of the 2000s with 2004’s Funeral (the first most acclaimed being Radiohead’s Kid A), and The Suburbs had even debuted at the top of the Billboard 200. But next to a gaggle of mainstream hit machines, the Canadian indie rock band didn’t stand a chance.

Adam Grundy Jul 31, 2020

There was a time when we all really didn’t know if we would ever get another Neon Trees album. After the release of their excellent third studio album in 2014, Pop Psychology, the band took a lengthy hiatus. Front-man Tyler Glenn released a solo album in 2016 that detailed his internal struggle with religion and his sexuality called Excommunication. There were a few teasers of new music from the band in the form of one-off singles such as “Feel Good” and “Songs I Can’t Listen To,” but no further announcements of them working towards anything concrete. The song “Used To Like” made its appearance out of nowhere in the middle of November, and that sparked a newfound interest in the band after so much time away. As shitty as a year as 2020 has been, we give our thanks to Neon Trees for making a brilliant comeback album called I Can Feel You Forgetting Me. This album is a collection of songs detailing the heartbreak in Tyler Glenn’s personal life and possibly a dual meaning of making their longtime fans remember the band they fell in love with in the first place. The vibes set forth on this LP teeter on the verge of a nighttime summer album, and the songs lend themselves well to the lofty expectations placed upon themselves in the legacy of their discography.

Anna Acosta Jul 30, 2020

Taylor Swift album cycles are starting to feel like Fall Out Boy lyrics circa 2005: Which came first, the ~~music~~ Taylor Swift record or the ~~misery~~ discourse? And I’m like, I just, I mean… this is exhausting, you know?

This time around, Taylor did something very new (for her). In a move that honestly only really works for the highest rollers in entertainment, she surprise-unleashed a 16 track full length, titled folklore, on the unsuspecting internet at large. Response was massive, immediate, and polarizing. For a huge number of listeners, both in the private and critical spheres, this release has been lauded as one of her best yet. It credits indie heavyweights Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon on the track “exile,” and the record’s production has The National’s Aaron Dessner all over it. To the more casual Swift listener–or to be exact, the “I’ve heard her singles, and that’s it” listener–this venture into the world of “indie” is out of character and out of left field, and as a result… feathers have been ruffled. And as tends to be the case with these things, the resulting discourse has, yet again, overwhelmingly failed to validate its own complaints. As usual with Taylor, it does this by focusing on snippy critiques mired more in misogyny than in the actual issues at play here.

Jason Tate Jul 29, 2020

The early versions of these “back to” articles felt like I was looking at a distant past, a version of myself that was so far removed from who I am today, a version doing things I can only remember around the edges. More the shape of memory, less defined lines. This year we get to 2013, only a couple years from the end of this iteration of this project.1 I look at the staff’s 2013 best of list and the memories around these albums feel fresh in my mind. I remember the buzz around The National. I remember The Wonder Years destroying our web server with the most-streamed song premiere we ever did. To date, that song’s been streamed over a half a million times on Soundcloud. I remember the return of Fall Out Boy, the legal drama of A Day to Remember, the My Chemical Romance hiatus, and my utter obsession with this new band called The 1975.

I have an idea of what I am going to do once we get to 2015.↩

Review: Taylor Swift – Folklore

Craig Manning Jul 29, 2020

Not many songwriters have ever been better than Taylor Swift at opening up a window into their own life. While songwriting is often a deeply personal artform, one of Swift’s greatest strengths has always been her ability to make listeners feel like she was singing to them from the pages of her diary. Some of her greatest songs—“All Too Well,” “Last Kiss,” “Long Live,” “Soon You’ll Get Better,” “Lover”—are snapshots of important moments or milestones of her life that she felt her fans deserved to live along with her: boys who broke her heart; triumphs of her young life; her mom’s battle with cancer; the relationship that might just stand the test of time. She’s always written these stories vividly, with details that make them feel as lived-in to you as your own memories: the places, the dates, the objects, the articles of clothing, the colors, the refrigerator light. Swift got so good so early on at telling her own story that, by the time she got to her most recent albums—2017’s Reputation and last year’s Lover—the songs had begun to feel like her chance to have the last word on all the tabloid bullshit that had built up around her life. The results were thrilling, but they sometimes lacked the lovely, unguarded scene-setting she’d perfected on Speak Now and Red. Instead of feeling like diary pages, the lyrics felt a bit like op-eds—still honest, still written with the strong voice of an obviously skilled scribe, but more clearly meant for public consumption. The thing that had made Swift seem most special at first—that you could picture her writing these songs in her bedroom, with no idea whether anyone would ever hear them—wasn’t as present anymore.

Craig Manning Jul 27, 2020

Taking a page from Drew Beringer’s book, and in line with Jason bringing back old historical content, I’ve begun restoring some of my favorite reviews from the AbsolutePunk days:

Adam Grundy Jul 27, 2020

The Richmond, Virginia pop-punk band Broadside have been through some intense changes in their lives, and they are still alive to tell the tale on Into The Raging Sea. Lead vocalist Oliver Baxxter looked inward for inspiration on this latest chapter on his band’s journey to finding their own voice in the crowded punk scene. The themes of overcoming the odds, growing up, and finding inspiration for a “rebirth” of sorts are prevalent on this record. When asked about his plan for overcoming all of the past heartache and the current state of his life, Baxxter said, “From the very beginning, my attitude was: I don’t have shit to look forward to, and everything behind me is trash, so I’m going to make myself the hero of my own story. I’ve always known struggle. As I get older, it’s more mental than physical, but it’s always there.” By taking his own lumps and persevering through it all, Baxxter becomes an instantly relatable presence for the misplaced army of his followers. Into the Raging Sea is a sprawling collection of songs that teeter on the edge of epic proportions, and every now and then Broadside meet their lofty goals on this expansive record.

Review: Wild Once – We Did It Anyway

Review: Gleemer – Down Through

Review: Acceptance – Wild

Back to 2015 (Re-Ranking the Best of Lists)

Interview: Alex Basovskiy of Only Sibling

Butch Walker Week

Back to 2014 (Re-Ranking the Best of Lists)

Review: Alanis Morissette – Such Pretty Forks in the Road

Review: Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

Review: Neon Trees – I Can Feel You Forgetting Me

On Taylor Swift and the Myth of “Limited Space”

Back to 2013 (Re-Ranking the Best of Lists)

Review: Taylor Swift – Folklore

Craig Manning’s AbsolutePunk.net Reviews

Review: Broadside – Into the Raging Sea