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.
I’m a casual fan, at best, of Spoon, the alt-rock band hailing from Austin, Texas.
I first discovered them in 2005 after the release of Gimme Fiction, a brainy funk album that didn’t sound like anything else I’d heard. I bought their next record, 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (think I got the right number of Ga’s) and enjoyed it but didn’t return to it very often.
I owe U2 an apology. When Songs of Innocence was creepily uploaded onto my phone, along with that of every Apple customer in the country, I initially panned it.
I don’t know if, like millions of others, I was turned off by the marketing ploy and held that against the record. Or maybe it’s just a grower. But I’ve come around to viewing it as a great late-career addition to their already impressive discography.
Lorde dominated the pop music conversation in 2013 but remained largely off the radar last year.
That is, until she took the reins of the latest Hunger Games soundtrack and reminded everybody how awesome she can be with its first single, ‘Yellow Flicker Beat.’
