Review: Butch Walker – Afraid of Ghosts

Craig Manning Apr 8, 2016

Sometimes, albums need to be made. Whether motivated by the break-up of a long relationship, the death of a loved one, or some other life-changing incident, there are certain records that aren’t just artistic choices for the musician making them, but artistic necessities. Butch Walker is no stranger to these kinds of records. He made one of them six years ago, after losing his home in a wildfire and getting a new perspective on the things that really mattered; he did it again two years ago, hurrying to finish a set of songs so that his father would hear them before he died. Both of those albums, the 2008 LP Sycamore Meadows and the 2013 EP Peachtree Battle dealt with heartbreaking situations, but turned them into life-affirming statements. The former is a reminder that material possession is never the most important thing in life, while the latter is a love letter to Butch’s father and the relationship the two shared; both are the kind of personal and intimate records artists don’t make anymore.

Review: The 1975 – I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it

Ryan Gardner Apr 8, 2016

After teasing “June 1st” for months in early 2015, The 1975 began posting cryptic images with text such as, “Pay not attention babe — it’s all pretend. Part of an act!!” and “Be Young and Shut Up.” Following a very brief disappearance from social media – prompting break up rumors – the band promptly returned on the afternoon of June 1st with a new pink album cover and revamped aesthetic. Gone was the expected black-and-white personality we had all welcomed from The 1975, welcomed was a splash of color – pink. Pink photos emerged, a pink album cover that mimicked that of 2013’s self-titled album, and pink attire.

Review: Weezer – Weezer (The White Album)

Aaron Mook Apr 5, 2016

This is not Pinkerton.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s examine where this 10th LP (fourth self-titled) fits within The Curious Case of Weezer.

To many, Weezer are hacks; they’re notorious for “selling out” (whatever that means), a band who’s switched not only styles but a frontman who famously experimented with hundreds of songwriting methods just to reach the heights of the band’s classic debut, Weezer (The Blue Album). But it’s what’s happened between the time of The Blue Album and now that makes the band (and their enigmatic frontman, Rivers Cuomo) so endearing. There was critical success followed by critical failure; addiction followed by isolation, all in the name of goofy songs like “Hash Pipe” and “Island in the Sun.” There was celibacy, meditation, marriage, divorce, a Lil Wayne feature, and a “return to form” all in the past two decades.

Review: Noah Gundersen – Carry the Ghost

Craig Manning Apr 4, 2016

Leading up to the release of Carry the Ghost, the second full-length album from Noah Gundersen, I was a little bit nervous. I loved Noah’s first LP, last year’s Ledges, so much that I couldn’t imagine the follow-up living up to my impossibly high expectations. If I had to pick a favorite record of the decade so far, Ledges would be it, so the thought of Gundersen making an album as good (or even better) was hardly something that I was even daring to hope for. Furthermore, the first track released from Carry the Ghost—the piano-led album opener “Slow Dancer”—showed that Noah was looking to flesh out his sound significantly on this record. Even on first listen, I really did love the song, but by the time an anguished electric guitar came ripping through the arrangement, I was worried that Carry the Ghost might fall victim to the pitfalls that singer/songwriters often encounter when they trade acoustic bedroom folk for lusher full-band textures. After all, we hadn’t heard a lick of electric guitar on Ledges.

Review: Into It. Over It. – Standards

Drew Beringer Apr 3, 2016

I know that the “six degrees of separation” is commonly linked to actor Kevin Bacon, but I think it’s time we made an exception to the theory and include Evan Weiss. Whether it’s through the seemingly hundreds of side projects he’s a part of (most recently Pet Symmetry and Their/They’re/There) or the handful of records he’s produced (ranging from bands like You Blew It! to Xerxes), it’s no wonder someone who’s definitely not me nicknamed the Into It. Over It. mastermind “the emo mayor” (consider this review my official apology for that, Evan). But a funny thing happened during the writing and recording sessions for his third album – turns out Standards isn’t an emo record after all.

Review: Brian Fallon – Painkillers

Craig Manning Mar 11, 2016

There aren’t many people in music right now who are under more pressure than Brian Fallon. Labeled as the torchbearer of the classic rock tradition upon the release of 2008’s The ’59 Sound—the sophomore album from his Jersey-based quartet, The Gaslight Anthem—Fallon has spent the better part of his career not just having to live up to the quality of his own albums and songs, but to his idols as well. A lot of people got into Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and Bob Dylan after hearing consistent references to each in Gaslight’s early music. In fact, Gaslight’s legacy got so entwined in the “inspired by Springsteen” narrative that fans started requesting Bruce songs at shows. Even Fallon’s side project, the Horrible Crowes, got whipped up in the Springsteen tornado, drawing at least a handful of parallels to Nebraska. Let’s be honest: figuring out a way to live up to an album as terrific as The ’59 Sound is hard enough. Doing it when everyone is comparing your stuff to albums like Born to Run and Damn the Torpedoes is just downright unfair.

Read More “Brian Fallon – Painkillers”

Review: Coldplay – A Head Full of Dreams

Craig Manning Dec 6, 2015

A year and a half ago, Coldplay released their best record. Let me stop you before you start trying to figure out how that warped timeline can get you back to 2008’s Viva la Vida or 2002’s A Rush of Blood to the Head. Sure, those records had big world-beating singles and a lot of ambition, but as an album, nothing in this band’s catalog touches Ghost Stories. A stark, spectral disc about a Chris Martin’s broken heart, Ghost Stories was great precisely because it played so against type for Coldplay. These guys were supposed to be stadium rockers! Where were the hooks? Where was the celebration? Where was the consummate hugeness that they’d been leveling up gradually for a decade? For most of their history, Coldplay have been a band about you and we, not a band about me. But on Ghost Stories, the key line was “Tell me you love me, if you don’t then lie.” It wasn’t a record that was meant for communal gatherings in stadiums or arenas; hell, it didn’t even sound like a record that was supposed to escape Chris Martin’s heartbroken, insomniac brain, so personal and intimate was the music within.

Craig Manning Nov 20, 2015

Here’s a monster of an unenviable task: following up an album that sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, spawned multiple ubiquitous singles, won a truckload of Grammys, spent 24 nonconsecutive weeks at number one, and was labeled by Billboard as “the Greatest Album of All Time”—whatever that means. Adele’s 21 was the kind of phenomenon that doesn’t happen in the music world anymore. Albums are obsolete for the average listener, right? Digital track sales are plummeting? Monoculture is dead? Adele defied every expectation and turned her sophomore album into a cultural sensation that was probably as close as our generation will ever get to having a Thriller. No wonder the British songstress took the better part of five years to drop the follow-up.

Unsurprisingly, 25 has arrived to endless comparisons to its predecessor—many of them unflattering. The reviews are mixed, and while the album will undoubtedly be a juggernaut that breaks sales records and single-handedly keeps the record business on life support for another few years, it’s already pretty clear that 25 is not going to have the legacy of adoration that its world-beating predecessor did.

Drew Beringer Oct 9, 2015

Out of all the bands I listen to, Mayday Parade has always been one of the most frustrating. Not because they can’t write pop-punk and pop-rock hits, it’s because the band has always been so close to writing a complete album that turns into one of the genre’s essential listens. After Jason Lancaster departed the band following the release of fan-favorite A Lesson In Romantics, Mayday Parade has had its collection of hits and misses; always close to that career-defining release but just never putting it all together. That all changes with Black Lines.

Craig Manning Aug 25, 2015

Today (August 25th, 2015), Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run has officially been around for 40 years. It’s only had a huge influence on my life, though, for about seven. For a considerable amount of my personal musical growth, I was aware of “the Boss” and his work, but it didn’t really resonate with me on a personal level. Born to Run, along with Born in the USA, Greetings from Asbury Park, and The Rising, were among the first albums I ever put on my first iPod back in 2004, as I looted my parents’ CD collection looking for more tunes to stock my brand new 20 gigabyte device. But while I loved hearing the title track pop up on shuffle during runs, and while later songs like “My City in Ruins” always struck a chord with me, it took another four years for Born to Run to really become that album in my life.

Review: Jack’s Mannequin – Everything in Transit

Craig Manning Aug 23, 2015

It’s late April 2010, but the weather is so glorious outside that it feels like it’s already June. Rain was threatening earlier, but now, the sun is beating down overhead as I pack the final items into my car for the three-hour journey home. I’ve just finished my freshman year of college and closed out a great semester, and my roommate and I are saying our goodbyes in the parking lot of our dormitory, after having handed over the keys to the room we’d shared since September. It’s a bittersweet moment, but I’m happy to be headed home to the resort town where I grew up for some much needed vacation. I climb into the front seat of my ’98 Honda Civic, plug my iPod into the FM transmitter, and briefly debate which album to choose. I smile as my thumb finds Jack’s Mannequinʼs Everything in Transit — one of my favorite albums of all time, and a record that has been my definitive “summer soundtrack” since I first discovered it four years earlier. I press play and the sounds of “Holiday from Real” come coursing through my speakers. “Fuck yeah, we can live like this,” Andrew McMahon sings. I put on my aviators, shift the car into first gear, and drive. This is going to be the perfect summer, I think to myself as I pull away from my first year of college. I can feel it.

Review: Frank Turner – Positive Songs for Negative People

Craig Manning Aug 15, 2015

Album sequencing is a tricky thing. When it works, sequencing should feel so natural that it becomes impossible to imagine the album in question being presented in any other way. Perfect sequencing can bring the themes of an album into clear and pointed relief, and can hide the flaws of an album’s weak songs while using the best ones as big peaking payoffs. In a way, the art of sequencing is as important for an album—and as difficult to master—as the art of songwriting itself. When track order is bad, it can push you into viewing an album less as cohesive artistic statement, and more as a collection of tracks. But when clear painstaking attention has been paid to finding the perfect sequencing, it can legitimately make an album.

AbsolutePunk Aug 12, 2015

The year 2007 was a good time for fans of alternative pop music. That year was absolutely littered with bands who were writing catchy hooks left and right: Mayday Parade, Every Avenue, All Time Low, Forever the Sickest Kids, We The Kings, Farewell, The Cab… the list goes on and on. The problem however was that this resulted in a homogeneous sludge of power chords and breakup lyrics that made it impossible for anyone to stand out. Well, there was also a five piece band from Tempe called The Maine that began making waves with their EP The Way We Talk in ’07. Fast forward eight years and, unlike the majority of the bands above who have more or less disappeared completely, The Maine withstood the test of time, and with the same lineup to boot. They’ve grown and adapted their sound through the years and they’re still alive and well, this time producing one of their most well-rounded releases to date with American Candy.

Blake Solomon Aug 11, 2015

Man, what a tall order it must be to create a pop-punk record in 2015. In a genre that went from maligned to mall playlist and back, it’s not surprising that bands are a little bit flummoxed as to what works and what should be left in a 9th grade trapper keeper. Knuckle Puck, perhaps more than any of their peers, toe this line delicately. While the music has grown up, offering instrumental denouements and actually interesting slow numbers, the lyrics are still firmly entrenched in the world of paralysis through heartbreak.

Craig Manning Jul 17, 2015

Is Jason Isbell the best songwriter of his generation?

The former Drive-By Truckers member certainly made a case for the affirmative on Southeastern, his breakthrough solo LP from 2013. Southeastern was the kind of remarkable record that only grows in stature, importance, and personal impact over time. Written in the wake of Isbell getting sober and taking control of his life, Southeastern was at once both mournful and hopeful. Within those songs was a man with a suitcase full of doubts about himself, but also someone with the resilience to push forward and be better—at least with the helping hand of the person he loved most. “Home was a dream, one that I’d never seen, until you came along,” Isbell sang on “Cover Me Up,” Southeastern’s stirring mission statement, and the best song of the decade so far. He wrote it for Amanda Shires, the woman he married just months before Southeastern dropped, and the person he credits with saving him from the darkness.

Review: Butch Walker – Afraid of Ghosts

Review: The 1975 – I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it

Review: Weezer – Weezer (The White Album)

Review: Noah Gundersen – Carry the Ghost

Review: Into It. Over It. – Standards

Review: Brian Fallon – Painkillers

Review: Coldplay – A Head Full of Dreams

Review: Adele – 25

Review: Mayday Parade – Black Lines

Review: Bruce Springsteen – Born to Run

Review: Jack’s Mannequin – Everything in Transit

Review: Frank Turner – Positive Songs for Negative People

Review: The Maine – American Candy

Review: Knuckle Puck – Copacetic

Review: Jason Isbell – Something More Than Free