Alice In Chains – Black Gives Way To Blue
Black Gives Way To Blue marks the return of the heaviest of all the grunge bands, at a time when their influence has become so corrosive on the modern rock world. So many bands that have followed have used the template, ignoring the heart. “All Secrets Known” is, honestly, a terrible way for a legendary band to open an album this important. Slow, tuneless, and unsure of its footing, the song kills four minutes of time before the real Alice In Chains steps out of the shadows. Much like the opening act at a show, it’s there, but no one is going to pay attention.
But when “Check My Brain” comes on, with the droning bent chords Cantrell fashions into a horribly addicted riff, attention must be paid. Those chords barely sound like notes, let alone music, but are hypnotic. When the song kicks into the chorus, the massive guitars finding their pitch and grabbing on for dear life, the moment is magical. The harmony between Duvall and Cantrell is perfect, and an uncanny replication of what he used to do with Layne. The song is like “Man In The Box”, only better. Really. |Read The Full Review|
Avett Brothers – I and Love and You
The results? Superb. I and Love and You is the Avetts’ best record yet, as Rubin has gotten hold of the Brothers at the right time, when they are peaking as songwriters and morphing into a different band, one that is realizing the limitations of their previous stage arrangement. For years, the Avett Brothers were a ramshackle trio, with Scott on banjo and kickdrum and Seth on guitar and hi-hat. The band made an impressive racket in this formation, performing blast-furnace versions of their mountain-punk rave-ups, but often the boys’ ardent vocals threatened to overwhelm the relatively thin instrumentation, and it became clear that the band needed to spread out sonically. |Read The Full Review|
La Roux – La Roux
Where electroclash dilettantes mistake digitalism as an opportunity to sing about sniffing hairspray in elite nightspots, Elly Jackson remains down-to-earth. Unlike cheap Lady Gaga or the WAGs of Girls Aloud – and despite the hype showered on to her ruddy quiff – La Roux is a style icon who still lives with her parents and sings simple lyrics about affairs of the heart, her acrobatic voice describing nothing outré as it flirts with and flits around the synthetics. |Read Full Review|
Where The Wild Things Are OST
Can you imagine The Graduate without Simon and Garfunkel? Or Youngblood Priest making deals in Super Fly not to the bass lines of Curtis Mayfield but some sort of infomercial-ready mishmash of funk’s “greatest hits”? Since that heyday of the hired-gun movie score, too many filmmakers (with the possible exceptions of Hal Ashby and P.T. Anderson) have seemed to prefer their soundtracks radio-ready and all over the place. Even the most musically inclined directors (Cameron Crowe and the late John Hughes come to mind) edited out most of the songs from their “official” soundtracks, until finally Zach Braff sent the hip-guy playlist off into the post-Napster era, when any hip guy with iTunes and a Pandora account can put together enough tracks to fit a mood. |Read The Full Review|
