Review: The Menzingers – After the Party

Jason Tate Jan 9, 2017

This first impression was originally posted as a live blog for supporters in our forums on January 9th, 2017. First impressions are meant to be quick, fun, initial impressions on an album or release as I listen to it for the first time. It’s a running commentary written while listening to an album — not a review. More like a diary of thoughts. This post has been lightly edited for structure and flow.

Finally!

I’m been embargoed on this sucker for what feels like forever and been aching to talk about it. And, with the last few weeks being a big move to get Chorus set up to work better with a version system (cleaning up my Git workflow and deployment) and working on a new Supporter Page (streamlining and creating a much better page for those that don’t wanna be a forum member to sign up), I’ve been itching to talk about music again. Always a needed distraction from some of the horrors going on basically everywhere else these days.

So, things are crossed off the ‘ol todolist and I’m ready to dive into what is sure to be a favorite of 2017.

Chorus.fm’s Top 25 Albums of 2016

Craig Manning Jan 8, 2017

Well then. That was a weird year.

In many ways, 2016 was a whirlwind—a confusing and frustrating year that will probably always be defined by its political tension and long list of celebrity deaths. For our staff and community, 2016 was also marked by the end of AbsolutePunk.net and the birth of Chorus.fm, a major transition that brought some serious nostalgia about the place where many of us grew up online.

No matter where you were or what you were going through in 2016, though, you probably at least had a great soundtrack to keep you company. By almost every metric, 2016 was a remarkable year for albums. If you are a fan of pop music and superstar acts, there was certainly no shortage of marquee releases for you to sink your teeth into. Even beyond the blockbuster surprises and capital-I “Important” albums, though, the year was a goldmine. Rock music was vibrant, highlighting both new bands and longtime veterans. Country music continued a resurgence that even self-described country haters could get behind. Hell, even the movie musical came back in a big way.

In virtually every genre or category, 2016 provided a wealth of new musical treasures. It’s no wonder that our contributors placed votes for 267 different albums while compiling this list. Ultimately, though, it was the 30 records listed below that rose to the top.

Review: La La Land

Craig Manning Dec 30, 2016

I don’t write a lot of film reviews, partially because I write for a music website and partially because I’m not usually on top of new releases enough to prepare anything that is particularly timely or relevant. But I just had to sit down and write something about La La Land, simply because I can’t remember the last time I loved a move so wholeheartedly.

Review: Acceptance – Colliding by Design

Jason Tate Dec 19, 2016

This first impression was originally posted as a live blog for supporters in our forums on December 19th, 2016. First impressions are meant to be quick, fun, initial impressions on an album or release as I listen to it for the first time. It’s a running commentary written while listening to an album — not a review. More like a diary of thoughts. This post has been lightly edited for structure and flow.

This is an album I really never thought we would be getting. A new Acceptance album basically a decade after the last one. I’ve spent quite a while listening to this one now, maybe 6 or 8 full listens (and I’ve had some of the songs unfinished for quite a while and had played them many, many times), so I’ll try and offer a little of that context with the first listen as well. I really do think that this album is best listened to three or four times before having too many thoughts on it. I think this for a few reasons:

I think that following up a loved album 10 years later is going to be impossible. Expectations on the band and what the listener thinks the music should be or sound like take some time to shake off and really listen to what the album itself is.
It’s a different vibe of an album as a whole. It’s … slower? more melodic … more Coldplay, Young the Giant, Tears for Fears, Mutemath at times, some early JEW sort of stuff going on. It’s a very layered album that is thick, lush, and has a sound that sounds, to me, like the band had made three albums during the last 10 years and this is the progression that comes out at the end. Basically, there’s a big leap from what Phantoms was to this. It’s not Phantoms part 2.
The songs find their own footing with more listens. They separate themselves and you can appreciate the small details and what the band was going for and how they really did put a lot of thought and intentionality into this album.
I liked a lot of these songs on first listen, loved a couple, but it really did take me listening to the album as a whole multiple times for me to really sink into this release and discover how much I really do love it.

Review: The Love Witch

Nathan Hall Dec 19, 2016

No film in 2016 is more gorgeous to watch than The Love Witch, shot in 35mm and stylized so precisely in every aspect. From the stunning costumes to the popping colors of the cinematography, the carefully constructed sets and the way light shines so perfectly on every object the characters interact with, the film is a visual masterwork. Director Anna Biller, who also wrote the script, edited the film, decorated the sets, and made the costumes, has brought to life an aesthetic vision unlike anything else made this year. Every frame is glorious, the cinematography so absurdly beautiful, an audience is hypnotized. Transfixed by such a magnificent visual work, we’re taken along for a ride for a film about a witch who endlessly seduces men and then, when each one inevitably disappoints her, kills them.

Review: Bon Iver – 22, A Million

Craig Manning Dec 16, 2016

The first time I heard 22, A Million, the long-awaited third album from Bon Iver, I hated it. To my ears, it sounded like a formless mess, devoid of any clear highlights (at least on the level of the best songs from Justin Vernon’s previous albums) and frequently undone by head-scratching production choices. Granted, I was listening to a shitty rip of a shitty stream that had leaked to the internet months in advance. I’d also had my expectations sent through the roof by live recordings of the band’s full playthrough of the record at this year’s Eaux Claires music festival. Even an amateur audience recording of the performance captured the magic of the new songs and made it sound like 22, A Million—despite arriving on five years’ worth of built up anticipation—was going to live up to my every expectation. Hearing the same songs in studio form didn’t hit me the same way, and I spent months considering 22, A Million my biggest disappointment of the year as a result. Even after the album officially released in September and I finally got to hear a full-quality version, I heard it as a distinct step down from its two predecessors.

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Jimmy Eat World – Live in Indianapolis (12/01/2016)

Drew Beringer Dec 15, 2016

I’ve been listening to Jimmy Eat World for over half my lifetime. Crazy enough, the last (and only) time I attended a Jimmy Eat World show was in 2005 when they were opening for Green Day on the American Idiot tour. That’s pretty sad! Fortunately, I made some sort of amends this past Thursday when the Arizona quartet made their way through Indianapolis. Headlining one of those radio station holiday shows, the band played a 20+ song set that included a well balanced mixture of hits, deep cuts, fan favorites, and new songs.

Review: Hailey, It Happens – Hailey, It Happens

Craig Manning Dec 14, 2016

Nothing good comes out in December, right? That’s more or less what most of the major music publications would have you believe, as End-of-the-Year lists start hitting the web in earnest earlier and earlier each year. This year, the start date was around Thanksgiving week. Maybe by 2026, we can make it all the way to Halloween! Personally, I’ll never finalize an AOTY list until mid-to-late December, and albums like Hailey, It Happens are Exhibit A for why that is. Not only was this record—the fourth official release and second full-length from Boston-based electropop duo Hailey, It Happens—a December 2nd release, but it’s also the kind of album that wouldn’t have sounded quite right until this particular time of year. On Hailey, It Happens, the band’s sound is driven by icy synths, yearning vocals, and wistful hooks built to come alive on the coldest nights of the year.

Review: The Alchemist Cookbook

Nathan Hall Dec 6, 2016

A man lives alone in the woods with his cat, attempting to use alchemy to summon the devil and create riches for himself. Plotwise, that’s about all there is to Joel Potrykus’ The Alchemist Cookbook, a film that I find hard to organize thoughts on. Much of what I like about it lies just beyond the grasp of my ability to verbalize, possibly because what I enjoyed so much in the film doesn’t quite feel concrete, and might more come from the feeling the film captures. This is a film with an aura, and for a film that deals so much with the implied, or presences more felt than seen, the balance is an accomplishment for Potrykus.

Review: Yellowcard – Yellowcard

Jason Tate Dec 1, 2016

With goodbye comes reflection. This reflection is often bittersweet as it drifts between that which has filled us with joy and that which has caused us pain. There’s a cauterization of once open wounds that necessitates a search for meaning in the steps that led us here. And it’s within this reflection that we try and attach understanding to our history. Why does saying goodbye make us feel this way? What is it about this specific action that leads to an emotional cluster-fuck? A perceptible and undeniable bond between love and sadness? I keep asking myself these questions as I prepare to say goodbye to one of the best bands that ever came from our music scene. A band that has soundtracked my highs, soundtracked my lows, and has been a constant musical mirror to the love, and sadness, that life has brought. As I walk into this realization, I can’t help but reflect on just how many of my goodbyes have been punctuated by a Yellowcard song. Goodbye to friends, goodbye to family, goodbye to relationships, goodbye to states, goodbye to innocence, goodbye to youth. And with that I realize that I don’t want to become numb to goodbyes. I want them to sting. I want them to hurt. I want the goodbye to be a remembrance of everything that led to that moment. Yellowcard’s final self-titled album is that pinprick. It’s that puncture against the consciousness that reminds me why I listen to music, it’s the melodic pull that has dominated my life for all these years. It’s between this intense feeling of familiar and new that I find the closing Yellowcard album lays itself to rest.

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Review: Countless Thousands – You’re Goddamn Right

Craig Manning Nov 30, 2016

I don’t review anywhere near a high percentage of the albums that land in my inbox. Largely, this fact is due to sheer, raw statistics. I get dozens of promos a day, most of them from artists I’ve never heard of. I don’t even have time to listen to the majority of them, let alone put pen to paper and give each album a fair, in-depth write-up. Believe me when I say that I wish I did have that kind of time.

With all that said, though, even I couldn’t resist giving Los Angeles rock band Countless Thousands a review, and their music was only one of several reasons. Between one of those eye-catching band names that pulls you in right away, a funny, tongue-in-cheek album title (You’re Goddamn Right), and an intriguing RIYL that included names like Against Me!, The Clash, and Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, these guys won my attention in a way that few unknown bands ever do with a promo email. Add a serious master class in bio writing, which casts the four band members as a “show choir reject,” an “East Coast jazz legend,” a “cosplay nerd,” and a “Civil War reenacting drum geek,” and I was ready to write half the review before I even pressed play.

Review: Moonlight

Nathan Hall Nov 28, 2016

No one is any one thing. Our identities have history, they are shaped by what is always inside us and how we react to external influences, two storms constantly colliding in our hearts and minds as we find and mold ourselves throughout our lives. In Moonlight we take that journey with Chiron, and it is a dynamic, beautiful, frustrating, achingly bittersweet arc. It is a black film that celebrates blackness by being thoroughly and dynamically black. It is a film about a man’s coming to terms with his sexuality and how it informs his masculinity in nuanced, layered ways. It is a human film, filled with complicated joy, paralyzing pain, and all the in-between. It is a remarkable coming of age film that evokes the classic imagery and sound of foreign arthouse works, but contextualizes those familiar notes in American blackness. The film brings to life a black experience that is allowed to be nuanced, human, and tenderly sexual. Barry Jenkins lifts each character up in empathy and actualization; even when it utilizes familiar archetypes they are contextualized in the entirety of Chiron’s experience magnificently. Moonlight is a stunning work.

Review: Two Tongues – Two Tongues Two

Aaron Mook Nov 25, 2016

Before I started writing this review, I felt the need to revisit both Say Anything’s album from this past January, I Don’t Think It Is, as well my subsequent review of the album that I wrote for AbsolutePunk.net. This was a surreal experience, partially because of my own disdain for the album but more so because I spoke with Bemis about the aforementioned review. Following its publication, we had a (very pleasant) dialogue about my review, Bemis’s music and art criticism in general, and all things considered, it proved to be a thought-provoking and productive conversation.

What you must understand is just how much Say Anything’s music has meant to me over the past decade. Even now, at a time in my life when I find myself returning to the band’s later output less and less, it’s easy to trace a thick black line from my tastes today to the year I discovered In Defense of the Genre, and subsequently …Is a Real Boy. At the time, my 13-year-old mind had never heard something quite so complex, so unique as Bemis’s knack for musical arrangement and lyrical phrasing. They were my favorite band for years, and the release of I Don’t Think It Is in January, my review and the discussion surrounding it, left me questioning my growing musical tastes, platform, and the very purpose of music reviews in the Age of Streaming.

Review: Max Fite – Shake It On Down

Craig Manning Nov 23, 2016

We’ve been hearing for years that “rock is dead,” but let’s just be honest: 2016 has been a damn fine year for rock music. Between new classics from the likes of Butch Walker and Jimmy Eat World, a Green Day album that was better than I ever expected a Green Day album would be in 2016, a sterling goodbye from Yellowcard, another strong round of emo releases led by The Hotelier, and the most ambitious Dawes album yet, 2016 has been the best year for rock in recent memory.

You can add Max Fite’s Shake It On Down to the list. An up-and-coming outfit from the Los Angeles area, Max Fite strike an effective balance between garage rock, 1990s brit pop, and whiskey-soaked southern rock. Held together by the voice of frontman Max Fitelson—who himself sounds like a mix between Craig Finn (The Hold Steady) and Noel Gallagher (Oasis), the band’s collision of different sounds coheres surprisingly well.

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Review: Brand New – The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me

Aj LaGambina Nov 22, 2016

In 2006, Brand New were a band known mostly for their work as one of the Long Island based pop-punk bands that managed to make it to a national stage. They were winding down from the success of their 2003 sophomore record Deja Entendu, an album that saw the band eschew the pop-punk tag in favor of more complex and dynamic songwriting, in addition to exploring more introspective themes than their contemporaries.

The sonic shift experienced between those first two records was nothing, however, when compared to the shift between the second and third. Complications arose in January of 2006 when nine demos leaked. This leak stalled the band’s creative process, further delaying their third LP. Though the band was vocal in their disappointment about these songs making it to the internet, it may have been for the best. And then, on November 21st, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me was unleashed onto the world. I think it’s fair to say that most of the people who have listened to the record have found themselves greatly affected by it. Why is that? I can only really answer by explaining my experience.