Review: Bush – Sixteen Stone

The 6x Platinum debut by English rock band, Bush, is getting a comprehensive vinyl reissue today in honor of Sixteen Stone’s 30th anniversary. You probably know the hits by heart. “Everything Zen,” “Little Things,” “Comedown,” “Machinehead” and “Glycerine” were the five massive singles released from this album that still stand the test of time today. The album was recorded at Westside Studios, London with producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, and marked the breakthrough of legendary Alt Rock frontman, Gavin Rossdale. Through his gritty vocal performance throughout Sixteen Stone, Rossdale captivated audiences far and wide on this record that if you didn’t own it yourself, you likely knew someone nearby who did. Bush had recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of Sixteen Stone with a comprehensive Greatest Hits tour that coincided with a singles compilation and put their decades-long career back into focus.

Craig Manning 1 month ago

Can it really be your “first documented, official pop album” if you’ve already released three of the biggest pop albums in recent memory? 10 years ago this weekend, Taylor Swift delivered the answer to that question, and the answer was a decisive, resounding “Yes.”

From the vantage point of 2024, it’s almost difficult to remember any version of Taylor Swift that wasn’t a world-conquering, stadium-tour-dominating pop star. The past two years of Taylormania have so thoroughly dwarfed any other pop star achievement in my lifetime that it’s even a little difficult to think back to pre-COVID times, when it seemed like the Taylor Swift machine was maybe starting to run out of gas. As mid-decade lists pour out from every music publication out there, I expect plenty of debates about what was the quote-unquote “best song” or “best album” of the decade. When it comes to discussing the artist of the decade so far, though, there is simply no debate: it’s Taylor, then it’s 93 million miles, and then it’s everyone else.

But it wasn’t always that way, and in the Taylor Swift story, it’s album number five, 2014’s 1989, that serves as arguably the most important inflection point between phase one Taylor and the force of nature we know today. Per the narrative, Taylor Swift before 2014 was a country star who had crossed over to pop music success but never fully left her Nashville roots behind. 1989, in being her “first documented, official pop album” – the weird phrasing she used to describe the LP when she officially announced it in August 2014 – was the album that made the crossover complete, and solidified Taylor’s status as the world’s biggest musical star in the process.

Craig Manning 1 month ago

It’s a sliding doors moment, the first time you hear a song that stops your heart. If you really think about it, any number of songs, at any number of moments in time, could be the one to change your life. For whatever reason, though, every music fan ends up with one: one song that, under the right mix of timing, circumstance, emotional clarity, and dumb luck, clicks onto your frequency and blows your whole fucking life apart. There will be other songs, after that one – many, many songs, if you’re lucky. But that one song – and that one band, and that one album – will always have a special place in your heart for what it did to kickstart something new inside of you.

I still remember the week that I heard Jimmy Eat World’s “Kill” for the first time. It was a rainy, gloomy October in northern Michigan, and I was an eighth-grade student slowly finding his way toward a deepening interest in music. In the preceding year, I’d even started finding songs that scratched some deep emotional itch in me – even if my not-so-evolved 13-year-old self couldn’t have expressed what it was about Snow Patrol’s “Run” or Nada Surf’s “Inside of Love” or Dashboard Confessional’s “Vindicated” that was making him ache. In other words, I liked music a whole lot, but I hadn’t yet opened myself up to the idea that it could take everything I was feeling deep down inside and set it to words and soundwaves.

The first time I heard “Kill” was on an episode of One Tree Hill, a not-so-well-written teenage soap that, at the time, was in its second season. Right away, I knew the song was special. It was one of those “stop what you’re doing, pay close attention and write down the lyrics so you can Google this later” kind of songs. (We didn’t have Shazam back then.) I just didn’t know how special it would prove to be.

Craig Manning 2 months ago

In the Yellowcard discography, Lift a Sail is the oddity. It’s not a pop-punk album, for one thing – not really even close. There are arena rock songs on this record, and songs inspired by ‘90s alt-rock, and songs with a whole lot of electronic flourishes, and songs that are experimental and minimalist. There are arguably zero songs that sound like the Yellowcard of old: the band with big, bright choruses, and lyrics about summertime, and triumphant electric violin solos, and rapidfire, double-time drums. And speaking of those drums, this record marks Yellowcard’s first without drummer Longineu “LP” Parsons III, whose technical acumen behind the kit was always a strong selling point for many listeners.

For all these reasons and more, Lift a Sail was a tough pill to swallow for a lot of Yellowcard fans when it arrived 10 years ago. I remember the AbsolutePunk.net forums in the days after the album came out, and the divide in the Yellowcard threads about whether it lived up to their legacy. Plenty of fans loved it, and found the departures the band made from their signature sound to be refreshing and invigorating. But another segment of listeners – if we’re being honest, a larger segment – was baffled by what they were hearing. The phrase “sell out” was definitely bandied about, as if no pop-punk band worth its salt could try on electropop flourishes without going artistically bankrupt. A lot of fans missed the pop-punk, missed the summertime vibes, missed the big choruses and the bigger drums. I definitely remember a few users saying that, if LP wasn’t going to be a part of the band’s universe anymore, then they didn’t want to be, either.

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31 Years Later: How Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Broken’ Blurs the Line of Fiction and Reality for a Terrifying Experience

Ashley Perez 2 months ago

What was the first movie that disturbed you? The movie that got under your skin so bad its images haunted your nightmares. A movie where the mention of its title makes you shudder and cringe. A good movie, but you never want to watch it again. Being a huge horror fan, blood and gore doesn’t shock me much. My idea of cozy is curling up with my dog and watching a good horror movie, like The Exorcist. Very few movies scare or disturb me. But when I stumble upon a movie that truly shakes me or disgusts me, it’s something I never forget. For me, one of those movies is Nine Inch Nails’ Broken.

Released in 1993 by Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor and Coil’s Peter Christopherson, the movie is a companion piece to the 1992 Broken EP. The record was a response to Reznor’s then-label TVT and former boss Steve Gottlieb. After the success of 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine the label pressured Reznor to create a similar album. Wanting to re-create the success of that album, TVT refused to release anything else Reznor gave them. Not wanting to compromise his music, Reznor demanded his contract be terminated; his request was ignored.

This didn’t stop Reznor. Instead, he recorded his next project in secret under various pseudonyms to avoid interference from the label. The music was markedly different from Reznor’s debut album. This was harsh, aggressive, ugly, and intense. There were no catchy songs and radio-friendly singles here. Reznor knew the label would hate it, but that was the point.

Adam Grundy 2 months ago

Black Gives Way To Blue proved that grunge was still alive and well in 2009. Alice In Chains decided to reboot themselves after the tragic death of original lead singer Layne Staley (in 2002) by beginning to play shows again in 2005 and start crafting what would be the material found on the band’s fourth studio album. Now getting the 15th anniversary vinyl re-press treatment via Craft Recordings, Black Gives Way To Blue gets another fresh makeover as audiences new and old can rediscover what made this band so legendary. The record was the first one to feature co-vocalist/guitarist William DuVall and he does a nice job of complementing the lead vocals from founding member Jerry Cantrell. The set would spawn four singles, with two of them earning Grammy nominations for Best Hard Rock Performance. Picking up the pieces after losing a band member is sadly all-too-common in the music industry, but Alice In Chains were able to honor the legacy of Staley in this vivid collection of songs that still highlight their staying power to this day.

Craig Manning 2 months ago

When was the last time it felt like a rock album took over the whole damn world?

For the most part, rock music has not been the defining music of the past two decades. There were exceptions along the way: The Suburbs winning the Grammy for Album of the Year felt like a coronation moment for indie rock. In Rainbows started a conversation around music commerce and distribution that helped shaped the industry we’re living in now…for better and for worse. Albums like Viva La Vida and Stadium Arcadium kept rock on mainstream pop radio and seemed legitimately inescapable for months and months.

But none of those albums hit every marker of a true-blue, world-conquering, era-defining blockbuster – the type of album rock ‘n’ roll used to serve up regularly, before hip-hop and R&B and big-tent pop took its crown. No rock album has checked all those boxes since 20 years ago this weekend. Since American Idiot.

Before this album even came out, it felt seismic – and “seismic” probably wasn’t what anyone was expecting from Green Day at the time. The band had followed a path of diminishing returns (commercially, at least) ever since they’d set the world on fire 10 years previous with Dookie. That album was a bedrock pop-punk classic, an album that laid the groundwork for a sound that became the go-to music in every teenager’s bedroom during the late ‘90s and early 2000s. But Green Day themselves weren’t really part of that turn-of-the-century dominance. While bands like Blink-182 and The Offspring were carving out household name status for themselves, Green Day were making increasingly commercially unviable records, like 1997’s all-over-the-place Nimrod, or 2000’s underrated folk-meets-pop-punk gem Warning. Depending on who you ask, the Green Day that existed at the outset of 2004 were already has-beens, coasting on past glories. They already had a greatest hits album out, after all, and arguably their most enduring song was an acoustic tearjerker that you couldn’t get through any graduation ceremony without hearing at least once. While other bands were carrying the torch Green Day had lit, the Berkeley punks were somehow already elder statesmen. It felt like their chapter of the story was over.

Adam Grundy 3 months ago

I’m sure many of us have a memory or two surrounding Let It Enfold You, the debut full-length record from the emo band Senses Fail. The memories we tie to music releases can get a little hazy over time, much less after 20 years. My best recollection of the release of Let It Enfold You was a combination of confusion, a whole lot of scene hype, and plenty of coverage in Alternative Press magazine. The confusion came in the form of Let It Enfold You being in record label limbo for quite some time, after Geffen Records (whom had absorbed Drive-Thru) lost interest in putting out the album, and Senses Fail deciding to leak the record after the trouble of finding a home for it. Vagrant Records eventually stepped up to the plate, and the hype behind this emo band steamrolled them to selling over 600,000 copies in the U.S. The album was frequently in the “Reader’s List” of top trending albums on Alt Press, while the band still was getting mixed reviews from most outlets unsure of where to best place the music that Senses Fail had created here. Let It Enfold You achieved commercial success, mostly by word of mouth, as Vagrant would only officially release two singles from the set in “Buried A Lie” and “Rum Is For Drinking, Not For Burning.” Senses Fail would cement their status as screamo heavyweights on their subsequent releases and showcase their staying power in the genre.

Adam Grundy 3 months ago

The sophomore album from metalcore band, Atreyu, took advantage of the momentum the band built on their debut (Suicide Notes and Butterfly Kisses), and saw them adding in more melodic elements to connect with larger audiences. The Curse was produced by veteran producer GGGarth (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine) and the set would go on to achieve RIAA Gold status with over 500,000 copies sold in the U.S. With a rockin’ trio of singles released during the promotion cycle that included “Right Side of the Bed,” “Bleeding Mascara,” and “The Crimson,” Atreyu were gaining fans at a speedy rate, and were able to back up the music found on the record effortlessly live. Now celebrating its 20th anniversary with a slew of vinyl re-presses via Craft Recordings, The Curse deserves another moment of reflection.

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Review: Butch Walker – Letters

Craig Manning 3 months ago

I think I’d been waiting for it.

Butch Walker released Letters, his second full-length album as a solo artist, on August 24, 2004, two weeks before I started eighth grade. At the time, I was right in the middle of a burgeoning obsession with soundtracking every moment of my life. Music had always mattered to me, but something had clicked during the previous school year and songs had taken on a different level of meaning for me since then. Before, I maybe just liked the way something sounded on the radio. Now, I was falling in love with the way those songs could encapsulate the rhythms of my days and nights. I figured: if movies and TV shows had soundtracks, why shouldn’t my life have one too? And so I’d spent months making mixes for everything: for the end of seventh grade, for my summer vacation, for my family’s annual summer road trip to visit my grandparents in New Hampshire, and for the impending end of the season and all the bittersweet emotions that made me feel.

What I hadn’t done yet was make a mix for a girl. I wasn’t too familiar with the concept of mixtapes – with what a collection of songs could mean when you picked the tracks and sequenced them and packaged them for someone you felt romantic feelings for. Surely, I would have found my way to the art of mixtape-ology no matter what, as all music fans do. How long can you obsess over using music to encapsulate your own internal life before you start thinking about how music can play the role of confessional love note? Probably not long. Before I could get there on my own, though, I found my Jedi Master on the subject of mixtapes, and it changed my entire life.

Craig Manning 4 months ago

When an album breaks a band you love, it gets saddled with a lot of baggage. Most albums are just a chapter in a band’s existence; there were albums before and there will be albums after. But the elephant in the room that music fans like to ignore is that there will always, eventually, be a last album, and a lot of “last albums” aren’t conceived or built to serve that role. When careers cut short because of death, or petty disagreements, or a simple exhaustion of ideas, it’s not usually the poetic ride-off-into-the-sunset conclusion we’d hope for. And yet, despite the randomness that often plays into the endings of musical careers, us music fans obsess over the lore and mythology of our favorite artists so much that we end up conferring significance that isn’t there on albums that just so happen to come at the end of the story.

Such was the case, for years, with Get Hurt, the fifth LP from New Jersey rock band The Gaslight Anthem. Released in August 2014, Get Hurt had the distinction for nearly a decade of being the final album that The Gaslight Anthem ever made. And for me at least, it collected all the baggage, lore, and extra fascination such a distinction entails. A part of me hated the album for breaking up a band I loved, for wasting the boundless potential I’d heard in their music just two years earlier. Another part of me loved it for the mystique of it all – the question of what it was about this particular set of songs that drove these four guys to the brink and forced them to pull the ripcord. To this day, when I listen to Get Hurt, those two parts of me are still in the room together, coexisting – even though, now, the album has been freed from most of the weight it was once tasked with carrying.

Adam Grundy 5 months ago

When AFI began their fourth studio album, Black Sails In The Sunset, with the memorable gang vocals of “Through our bleeding, we are one!” they lit the match for one of the most explosive band trajectories ever witnessed in this scene. This would be the first LP with the now-classic lineup of Jade Puget, Adam Carson, Hunter Burgan, and Davey Havok, and featured a dramatic shift away from the punk rock sound they had explored on their earlier work in favor of a darker-tinged aesthetic. Black Sails In The Sunset is one of those gripping albums that grab the listener by the throat from the very first spin and beckons them to join in the fray. While AFI certainly weren’t the only punk band to explore a darker side to the sound, they did seem to do it a bit more flawlessly than the bands that would later emulate their career path.

This album has recently received a fresh vinyl reissue via Craft Recordings, that releases on July 19, 2024, and it includes several additional bonus tracks like “Midnight Sun,” “Who Knew?”, “Weight Of Words” and the previously vinyl-only song of “Lower It” has been added to the tail end of the tracklisting (rather than closing out Side A, as found on previous vinyl versions). AFI have re-captured our collective imaginations on this thrilling, comprehensive reissue that hits just as hard as it did back in the early summer of 1999.

Adam Grundy 5 months ago

The self-titled record from Fenix TX came with a number of firsts for the band. It was their first major label LP, the first record that they would release after re-branding from Riverfenix to Fenix TX, and their first real exposure to the mainstream of pop-punk that was beginning to blossom during the summer of 1999. Other pop-punk bands, like Blink-182, were getting major radio airplay and more audiences were being exposed to this genre of music. Fenix TX was produced by Jerry Finn, Ryan Greene, and Jim Barnes, and the band would continue to work with Finn on their equally successful Lechuza. This self-titled LP by the pop-punk band from Houston still sounds as charming, polished, and at moments a bit before its time. For every great track like “All My Fault” and “Flight 601 (All I Got Is Time),” there’s a goofy song like “Rooster Song” to show their audience that they were growing up and to not be taken too seriously. There’s plenty to love and enjoy on this LP that would provide plenty of clues of where Fenix TX would take their sound on subsequent releases.

Adam Grundy 5 months ago

Twenty-two million fans can’t be wrong, right? The 22x-platinum debut from Hootie & The Blowfish is a remarkable achievement of staying true to the band’s roots and being willing to be different from what was dominating the rock scene in the mid-90’s. Grunge rock was everywhere during this time period, so most major labels passed on the thought of signing a pop-rock band from South Carolina. Cracked Rear View opened to a modest charting of #127 on the Billboard 200, but it would quickly build momentum and become the best-selling album of 1995. The record was produced by Don Gehman (R.E.M., John Mellencamp) and would spawn five successful singles that still get radio airplay to this day. While Hootie & The Blowfish would have trouble replicating the magic found on their debut LP on their subsequent releases, these songs still stand the test of time and remain a key example of how writing authentic, heartfelt tracks can lead to success.

The record sets off on the right tone with “Hannah Jane,” a straight forward pop-rock track that quickly showcases the band’s great chemistry between each other, and lead singer Darius Rucker’s captivating vocal performance remains a key part of Hootie & The Blowfish’s success story. “Hold My Hand” was the first single to be released from the set and it’s a steadfast choice of a track to introduce the band to the world and continues to be a staple in the band’s live performances. The lead single is a key example of how the band understood what made their music accessible, catchy, and heartfelt simultaneously in an era when pop-rock wasn’t a major seller.

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Review: Underoath – They’re Only Chasing Safety

Adam Grundy 6 months ago

It’s pretty amazing to think just how captivating Underoath were on their fourth studio album called They’re Only Chasing Safety. The album was first released on June 15, 2004 via Solid State Records and was produced by James Paul Wisner, and surprisingly enough, only had two official singles released from the set in “Reinventing Your Exit” and “It’s Dangerous Business Walking Out Your Front Door.” The LP has since been certified Gold, and remains one of the most influential records in the emo/hardcore scene. After their third record, The Changing of Times, nearly half of the band members had changed for this “version” of the band, now considered to be the “classic” lineup. They’re Only Chasing Safety, to this day, remains an adrenaline shot to the ears with its mix of post-hardcore, emo, electronica, and punk rock. The album features a creative blend of clean/screamed vocals by Spencer Chamberlain and drummer/vocalist Aaron Gillespie, while the rest of the band members make their presence felt in several different spots on the record. They’re Only Chasing Safety, and their subsequent album of Define The Great Line, are consistently pointed to by fans of Underoath as their best work, and the band can look back on this 20th anniversary proudly knowing that they captured lightning in a bottle at just the right moment in time.

Review: Bush – Sixteen Stone

Review: Taylor Swift – 1989

Review: Jimmy Eat World – Futures

Review: Yellowcard – Lift a Sail

31 Years Later: How Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Broken’ Blurs the Line of Fiction and Reality for a Terrifying Experience

Review: Alice In Chains – Black Gives Way To Blue

Review: Green Day – American Idiot

Review: Senses Fail – Let It Enfold You

Review: Atreyu – The Curse

Review: Butch Walker – Letters

Review: The Gaslight Anthem – Get Hurt

Review: AFI – Black Sails In The Sunset

Review: Fenix TX – Fenix TX

Review: Hootie & The Blowfish – Cracked Rear View

Review: Underoath – They’re Only Chasing Safety