Album Reviews Archive
Album Review: Green Day ‘¡Uno!’
October 11, 2012
Green Day was my favorite band when I was eleven years old, and it’s sort of surreal to me that they are still going and making almost exactly the same sort of music almost twenty years later. I imagine there is a generation who think Green Day got their start with American Idiot, and who
Album Review: Bob Dylan ‘Tempest’
October 10, 2012
It isn’t easy to review a living legend, because there is a small part of me that might want to go easy on Bob Dylan. After all, I am probably not qualified to offer criticism to a man who surely knows a bit more about music than I do. Even if I find fault with
Album Review: The Killers ‘Battle Born’
October 3, 2012
The Killers still feel like a young band. Granted, they are only in their thirties, but they manage to feel even younger, like twenty-somethings or even teenagers, poking at life with a long stick and exploring music and expression with great passion. They do it with respect for their own songs though, and they take
Album Review: Ben Folds Five ‘The Sound of the Life of the Mind’
October 3, 2012
That’s one heck of a title. It could be interpreted any number of ways, but being that this is a Ben Folds Five record I think the simplest explanation makes the most sense: This is an album of modest expression from a group of people who are both introspective and celebratory about life, and all
Album Review: The xx ‘Coexist’
September 25, 2012
The xx gained a little bit of notoriety leading up to the release of Coexist by first streaming the album from their own website, with a map to show the way that the music spread over the Internet and the world. A nifty idea, albeit the map really just showed a nuclear explosion of lines
Album Review: Owl City ‘The Midsummer Station’
September 11, 2012
You almost can’t get less cool than Owl City. Well, at least in the eyes of some of us, because after that ‘Fireflies’ song I’m going to have a hard time taking Adam Young completely seriously. The hope may be that there really are enough hipsters in the third grade to sustain him for the
Album Review: Trey Songz ‘Chapter V’
September 9, 2012
The album cover for Chapter V is anything but romantic or sexy, which are two words I would use to describe the content, even if they are sometimes in conflict with one another. The artwork depicts a series of five Treys stood in formation in a black and white photo, ruggedly textured and distressed, behind
Album Review: The Flaming Lips ‘The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends’
September 9, 2012
For what has the appearance of a compilation album, and is ostensibly an excuse for The Flaming Lips to work with a bunch of artists they seem to appreciate, it makes for a stellar album experience. I fully expected the songs to be disconnected, slightly self-serving jams and experiments. While the album runs the gamut
Album Review: Joss Stone ‘The Soul Sessions Vol 2’
September 4, 2012
When Joss Stone released her debut album, The Soul Sessions, in 2003, her voice and style of music were fairly unexpected. It was almost a novelty; this beautiful, young Brit singing the forgotten gems of an older generation of American singers. 2007’s Introducing Joss Stone was an album described as the artist finding her own
Album Review: Bloc Party ‘Four’
September 2, 2012
Fans of Bloc Party have had reason to worry about the future of the band for a while now. They appeared for a time to be a bit lost as far as what to do next, and seemed to be on the verge of breaking up all together. After a bit of a hiatus though
