After the disastrous ‘Accidental Racist’ derailed his ambitious album Wheelhouse, Brad Paisley retreated to lick his wounds and came back this year with a good-old country record, Moonshine in the Trunk.
It’s a fun album but not an entirely memorable one, especially when compared to the excellent stretch of records that culminated in American Saturday Night.
Has anyone ever been as simultaneously laughed at, despised and revered as Kanye West?
He is often portrayed as a joke for his tremendous ego and outrageous statements, not to mention his marriage, and yet his last four albums have all topped critics’ lists and received praise so lavish it borderlines on absurd.
I like Rob Thomas as a person (based on some interviews I’ve seen and read) and I like a few of his songs (‘Smooth’ is still brilliant 15 years later), but this white-boy soul track just doesn’t do it for me.
Thomas hasn’t released an album in five years, and the last reference on his Wikipedia page is to 2010, so I wonder what he’s up to. Playing the festival circuit? Chilling with his pretty, lupus-afflicted wife?
I saw Counting Crows in concert last summer and loved the show but was underwhelmed by a couple of tracks from their then-upcoming album, Somewhere Under Wonderland.
When I got the album, I was pleased to find that they’d played my two least favorite tracks, and the rest of the record was as light and lovable as those two were ponderous and dull.
Bleachers, the side project (or is it his main one?) of fun. lead guitarist Jack Antonoff, put out a self-titled debut that sounds like it was pressed in the 80s.
I don’t know if it was Antonoff himself or a review of the album I read, but I recall a description of this record as the end credit music of a John Hughes film, and that captures its essence just perfectly.
