With the release of his first full-length solo record, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, former Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher breaks a two-year silence and, in doing so, finally joins his brother Liam in the post-Oasis sweepstakes.
While the esteemed Athens, GA band’s new album, Collapse Into Now, doesn’t hit streets until March 8, NPR is currently streaming the album in its entirety.
Noel who? Liam Gallagher’s Beady Eyes deliver one of the most exciting debut albums of the last decade with ‘Different Gear, Still Speeding’
The new Strokes album ‘Angles’ is due out in 20 days, however, iTunes has put up 30 second previews of all their new tunes. I don’t really get the whole ‘preview’ deal, to me it’s a total ‘ear tease’. Still, at the risk inflicting myself with a bad case of ‘blue ears’, I’m going to play the role of an old school A&R man and attempt to divine whether or not I smell ‘gold’! After all, 30 seconds is generally all you need to decide if a song has got the stuff to hold your interest…no?
My comfort zone is actually quite small. In reality, I hate most music. I appreciate almost all music, for all its merits and all that, but the music I actually willingly listen to in my free time is safe. It’s music with guitars, almost exclusively of an indie rock/alternative rock variety. It’s what I enjoy, so I don’t deny that despite the guilt I feel for never listening to hip hop or dance music or electronica. There’s music critic world and there’s the world I live in, which is soundtracked by distortion and sweet guitar riffs and fuzzy vocals. And that’s why I love Yuck’s eponymous debut.
Well I guess we all know who the winner of the “Who’s gonna fill the hole Amy Winehouse left?” sweepstakes is.
Has there ever been a rock album quite like Born to Run? As a young person it’s easy to grow up listening to “Born in the U.S.A.” and “Glory Days” and thinking that Bruce Springsteen is essentially a glorified heartland rocker, in the vein of Bob Seger or John Mellencamp. And early in his career, Springsteen had already been hailed as the next Dylan after his first two albums, 1973′s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, thanks in part to a proclivity toward lyric-heavy songs like “Blinded by the Light” and “Growin’ Up.” But with the release of Born to Run in 1975, Springsteen established himself as a bona fide rock ‘n’ roll revivalist: a devout acolyte of Elvis, Roy Orbison, and, maybe more than anyone, producer Phil Spector, whose lush arrangements were responsible for the iconic “girl group” sound of the ’60s (and the oft-maligned orchestra backgrounds on the Beatles’ Let It Be album). Born to Run is an album of dualities – entrapment and rebellion, joy and sorrow, hope and despair. But more than anything, it’s an album that aimed to synthesize Springsteen’s ratty, working-class, quintessentially urban personality with the saccharine sheen of 1950s and ’60s pop. The result is something entirely unique: a rock ‘n’ roll opus that moves effortlessly from the backstreets to the front porch to the boardwalk, encapsulating exactly what it means to be young and restless and out of control.
“Firewall,” the opener to Bright Eyes’ latest album The People’s Key, begins with a spoken introduction that had me pretty instantly hooked the first time I heard it. I’ve always been a sucker for all texts mystical – the Gnostic Gospels, Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, Stephen King’s Dark Tower series – so hearing an apparent crackpot named Denny Brewer riffing on theories about malicious, reptilian, interdimensional beings who’ve been around since the Garden of Eden (“Space is expanding. There are spirits coming from the center, right? The universe is moving counter-clockwise…”) was, admittedly, thrilling. I began imagining an album full of stark, chilling meditations on the darkness that permeates the fabric of the universe – something I could really sink my teeth into.
You’d think that nearly half a decade would provide sufficient enough time to come up with something that could satiate the public’s rabid desire for a new direction from their favourite group… it didn’t have to be the next OK Computer (it would’ve been nice, but it didn’t have to be), but just not more of the same nebulous noodling of the last decade.
Much as I love Lemmy, for the past decade and change, I have come to regard each new Motorhead album as a bit of an exercise in futility.
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