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Interview: Chuck Comeau of Simple Plan

Simple Plan
AbsolutePunk

How’s it feel to finally have your new song, “Saturday,” out?

We’re excited! It’s been a long time since we’ve put out new music. The last thing we did was like this little EP that was a little bit of a b-side, I guess, quote, unquote — songs that were leftover from the Get Your Heart Onalbum. We take a little bit of time in between records because we go on tour for two, two and a half years on each cycle. Then we stop for a few months, catch our breath, and then we start writing and we write for a long time. We wrote for like a year and a half on this album. We wrote like 70-75 songs. It’s definitely exciting. People have been waiting and we’re finally able to give them something they can listen to and get stoked about the album. It feels good to feel like, “Okay, we’re kicking up in gear,” and we’re slowing switching from writing, making the record, and recording it, to actually having music out and going back on tour and planning some shows and the album cover and all that. So it’s exciting that we, as a band, have the luck and the privilege to be doing it for a fifth time.

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Review: Kacey Musgraves – Pageant Material

Kacey Musgraves - Pageant Material
Craig Manning

Country music is ripe for a civil war.

Over the course of the last few years, Nashville has segmented into two very distinct groups. On one side of the industry, there are the people who are willing to play the game, to sacrifice the classic core of the country music genre—ostensibly, deep and unusual storytelling—in order to sell records. This group is where you will find the “bro country” collective, “artists” like Luke Bryan, the Florida Georgia Line, Blake Shelton, Toby Keith, Billy Currington, Darius Rucker, Jason Aldean, and pretty much every male singer on country radio. These guys write songs (or often, accept songs from other writers) that extoll the virtues of drinking, driving trucks, and objectifying women. Said songs are usually hollow, derivative, and overproduced, but boy, do they sell.

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Review: All Time Low – Future Hearts

All Time Low - Future Hearts
AbsolutePunk

Properly appreciating All Time Low’s Future Hearts requires a bit of background education. While the Baltimore quartet’s newest effort is impressive in its own right as a complete and well-rounded pop record, the gravity of All Time Low’s current success, in songwriting and in relativity, weighs more when it’s put in context.

Put simply, the argument can be made that All Time Low shouldn’t be in this position; they shouldn’t be releasing Future Hearts at all, and certainly not to this much fanfare. The band didn’t just face a major crossroads after the release of its 2011 major label debut Dirty Work, but a question of whether they should still exist.

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Review: Death Cab For Cutie – Kintsugi

Death Cab For Cutie - Kintsugi
Ryan Gardner

The word ‘Kintsugi’ means a “style of art where they take fractured, broken ceramics and put them back together with very obvious, real gold. It’s making the repair of an object a visual part of its history.”

It has understandably been a hard four years for Death Cab For Cutie since Codes & Keys came out. First, Ben Gibbard’s divorce makes for a departure from the newfound love that existed in songs like “Stay Young, Go Dancing” on Codes. Second, guitarist and founding member – and perhaps most importantly long-time producer – Chris Walla decided to leave the band, with this being his final album. The result of these situations is Kintsugi. 

Entirely true to its name, the album expresses the void felt by Gibbard – the need to fix (or fill) something that is broken, to find something that is missing. The opening “No Room In Frame” begins with music that feels desolate and incomplete before Gibbard solemnly admits, “I don’t know where to begin.” The eerie music carries on, as the choppy guitars and drums add weight to the heartbreak of the line “And I guess it’s not a failure we could help / And we’ll both go on to get lonely with someone else.” The repetition of “with someone else” adds another blow to the gut, really letting the sheer desolation of the song sink in. One track in and we already have the fractured heartbreak that resonates throughout Kintsugi, just as the name implies.

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Review: Modest Mouse – Strangers to Ourselves

Modest Mouse - Strangers to Ourselves
Craig Manning

”I’m listening to a new Modest Mouse album.”

For a very long time, that seemed like a sentence no one would ever be able to utter honestly. As the years wound past following 2007’s We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank—a record that dropped when I was 16 years old—the same pattern repeated over and over again. First, the band would make some comment about writing songs or heading into the studio; then, fans would throw Modest Mouse on their most anticipated lists, saying things like “IT’S GOING TO BE THIS YEAR!!!” And then, inevitably, December would come to a close without any word about a new record. Soon enough, we’d all start the vicious cycle all over again.

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Review: Mat Kearney – Just Kids

Mat Kearney - Just Kids
Gregory Robson

In a little over a decade Mat Kearney has built a career (and life) most would envy. He’s sold over a million albums, has had a half dozen singles, traveled the world, married a model and continues to inspire his countless fans. Just Kids, the fifth album from the Nashville-based singer-songwriter is arguably his most personal and honest record, but it is far from his best. For those who like a record to be one in which the artist reveals a lot of himself, then there will be plenty to love about Just Kids. Moreover, those who enjoy Kearney’s spoken-word-cum-hip-hop vocal stylings found on Bullet and Nothing Left to Lose, will also find plenty to relish in. But neither of those things makes an album and for its numerous charms, Just Kids still falls way short. For starters, the album’s sonic veneers veers heavily towards commercialism and accessibility and maybe that’s viable to some, but at this point in his career he should be crafting albums that are daring, innovative, original and challenging. Just Kids is neither of those things. 

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Interview: Butch Walker

Butch Walker
Craig Manning

Last week, I got a chance to chat extensively with a personal hero of mine, Butch Walker. We talked about Butch’s new album, Afraid of Ghosts, including how the recent loss of his father inspired a new direction for his music, why he decided to have Ryan Adams produce the disc, and why his trademark sarcasm and upbeat songwriting is nowhere to be found. We also touched upon Walker’s back catalog, the woeful reasons why no one should be expecting to find Letters on vinyl anytime soon, whether or not The Black Widows will be making music again in the future, and why Butch’s protege Jake Sinclair took over most of the production duties on the new Fall Out Boy LP.

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Review: Against Me! – Transgender Dysphoria Blues

Against Me! - Transgender Dysphoria Blues
Jason Tate

About one minute into the lead track, front-woman Laura Jane Grace snarls, “you want them to notice the ragged ends of your summer dress, you want them to see you like they see every other girl, they just see a faggot, they’ll hold their breath not to catch the sick” … and the gauntlet is thrown down. What Against Me!’s new album, Transgender Dysphoria Blues, offers is a mixture of attitude and bravado that pulls together an emotion, weight, and gravitas that I’ve felt missing from music for a while. The lyrics contain something actually worth saying and while the sing-a-long choruses may get stuck in your head, there’s an underlying message that expels itself in a way unique to music — one that travels from head to heart and leads to rumination long after the guitars and drums dissipate.

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