Like 90% of compelling songwriting is creating tension and then releasing it. A chorus explodes after coming out of a bridge. A DJ annihilates a dance floor with a massive drop. A jazz ensemble instantly lock together for a song’s head after a trading solos. You can think about a song like a rubber band. […]
For the first time since AC/DC released Power Up in 2020, a metal band has reached the top of the Billboard 200 – two actually. Ghost’s Skeletá topped the chart back in March, and Sleep Token’s Even In Arcadia did so earlier this week. Fans of metal, rock, and guitar music hope it’s a return […]
This week’s Heck Record was a special request by Kylee. If you want to recommend an album for the Heck Record of the week, put it in the comments. Indulge me, please. I made a D&D Character Alignment Chart for Friendly and Weird. What makes a band friendly? You might think that it’s whether or […]
After writing last week’s column on Pere Ubu, I’ve spent a lot of ear-time with their fellow ‘70’s post-punk bands. I’ve marveled at how singular and catchy their music still is (Gang of Four, Joy Division), how knotty and difficult it remains (The Pop Group, This Heat), and sometimes both (Public Image Limited’s Metal Box). […]
David Thomas of Pere Ubu died last week at 71. He was listening to MC5 on the radio. The band wrote that “he will ultimately be returned to his home…where he insisted he was to be ‘thrown in the barn.’” Happy trails, cowboy. Broad and heavyset, Thomas looked like Edward G. Robinson but he sang […]
St. Vincent seems programmed to appeal to me. She’s fond of snaky guitar lines and bouts of atonality. She played in a noise rock band called the Skull Fuckers. And she took her nom de plume from a Nick Cave lyric and named her debut after an Arrested Development joke. That debut was called Marry […]
Roxy Music was too small for both Brian Eno and Bryan Ferry. Fifty years on that seems like the most obvious statement in the world, but I bet the separation felt traumatic for their fans at the time, who (wrongly) thought the flamboyantly dressed, knob-twiddling synthesizer player, Eno, was the brains of the band, while […]
When asked why he never cheated on his wife Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman famously said, “I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger?” It sounds very romantic, but it also seems like he dodged the question by asking a rhetorical one of his own, a question whose answer isn’t as […]
We’re coming up on 30 years of the mainstreaming of the internet and I think there’s an argument to be made that it has, overall, been a net negative for politics, culture, and humanity. Most probably agree that its good/evil splits are around 51/49, flopping one way or the other depending on what’s happening in […]
Culture doesn’t evolve all at once. Nirvana released Nevermind in September of 1991, but Guns ‘N Roses’ Use Your Illusion II came out the very next month and knocked it down the charts. The arrival of grunge supposedly signified that leather was out and flannel was in, but leather wasn’t going anywhere. Nevermind popped up […]