27 January 2012
Whatever Panic! at the Disco did to make themselves pop sensations with their debut release, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, they neglected to do on their sophomore release. That conscious decision made by the band to leave behind their commercially successful sound in favor of exploring new territory resulted in Pretty. Odd., an odd [...]
26 January 2012
If you look at music in the 1980s, a lot of what garnered attention from the mainstream was cheesy synth-pop ballads like “You Spin Me Around” or “I Ran.” Coinciding with the music of the time, a lot bands wore flashy and colorful outfits in an attempt fit in with what was trendy for the [...]
25 January 2012
Really pushing the limits of what constitutes an album on this site when I review a 3 song EP, but Lion Hat by Unicorn Kid has been getting a lot of play lately and is definitely a nice electro pop gem. Unicorn Kid is a producer out Edinburgh that makes some seriously danceable and upbeat [...]
24 January 2012
It’s hard to come by this record without the awkward feeling of familiarity when it comes to the artist’s name. Wugazi is a derivative of Fugazi with an addition of Wu-Tang Clan prefix at the head. To be honest I had never been the fan of either. I’ve heard a great deal of Fugazi and [...]
23 January 2012
Dear Mike Listens To Records, We have noisy neighbors who keep us up every night. What record should we play at six in the morning to even the score? Angry in Amherst Dear Angry, It’s hard for me to hear about noisy neighbors because I was one for years. My poor ex-landlords are still cursing [...]
22 January 2012
There are myriad reasons as to why Empyrium’s 1997 opus Songs of Moors and Misty Fields is such a spectacle as an album. It predates most music in its vein by a significant few years and bears few predecessors, though enough to see where the ideas came from. One would hazard a guess that the [...]
21 January 2012
Approximately a year and a half ago, one of my good buddies told me of an amazing show he had seen while living in Montreal. In person, they were supposed to be incredible, and through MP3s, I was picking up the same vibes he was feeling. Instantly, I knew this was a band I could [...]
20 January 2012
One emcee, one DJ, no gimmicks was the winning formula for elite hip hop duo Gang Starr. Their style of hip hop rose to prominence around the early ‘90s alongside other equally influential hip hop artists the likes of A Tribe Called Quest and Brand Nubian. Dedicated to bringing the truth to air and digging [...]
19 January 2012
“I just find that when I listen to it—I’ve listened to it so many times at this point—I can almost just call up a lot of those songs in my mind, even if I’m nowhere near a stereo. It changes my posture. It changes the way I walk. If I’m writing an email to somebody, [...]
18 January 2012
I generally like to stay away from cliché terms like chill or trippy when describing music, but when it comes to guys like Nosaj Thing sometimes there’s just no good words to try to explain what this music sounds like. Best known for making the instrumental Kid Cudi used for Man on the Moon (The [...]
17 January 2012
For the mainstream radio listeners, the name Calvin Harris probably doesn’t mean all that much. When you mention that he made the beat for Rihanna’s “We Found Love” though, they probably perk up their ears and make a statement about how he’s a newcomer (they are radio-lovers after all). But that couldn’t be further from [...]
16 January 2012
Sometimes labels hinder. I’ve written about this a little bit in the past, most recently in my Metallica review of a few months back: associating music (or, for that matter, books, pottery, dance, whatever) with some kind of genre provides an unfair and often unflattering preconception of the art in question. Of course, we need [...]
15 January 2012
Korn’s success was, in hindsight, unsustainable. It was very much the sort of success which eats a band alive from the inside out and, when combined with a false consciousness and slip in the way in which a band sees itself and the way everyone else sees it, might cause a band to release an [...]
14 January 2012
Near the end of the track “Louder” the words “this is the best elevator music I ever heard” are spoken in a rather dead pan tone. The moment perfectly encapsulates for me what Danny! has been about, and how this album builds on it. The off kilter humor with non-serious undertones interlaced between intense and [...]
