Godzilla ain’t the only hardcore badass from Japan. I’m not the Japan expert around here – that distinction falls to blogger, poet, photographer and Japanophile extraordinare Dan Ryan – so I won’t pretend that I know anything about J-Pop. It just felt like a nice day to do something a little different for SVR, and I’ve been thinking about Dir
Read moreHot Nun, Veronica Falls and Fish released wonderful CDs last year that belong on my top albums of the year list. As noted some time back, there are always CDs I don’t get around to during the year in which they’re released, and with the great ones I accordingly fail to include them in my year-end mentions. I’ve already done a
Read moreOh, I love that song. How many times have you been talking about music and somebody says hey, what’s your favorite tune by [fill in the blank]? I have no idea how many times I’ve asked or tried to answer that one, but many. Many many. I thought it might be fun to do a little post where I confront
Read moreThe Beatles have collaborated with some of the world’s most popular artists through the years. Mashups have become their own art form, and perhaps nobody has been more important to perfecting the genre than The Beatles. Take their famous collaboration with Motley Crue.
Read moreIt’s Matt Grimm Day at S&R and we’re celebrating music with a social conscience. Join us? We love great bands and artists of all stripes around here, but by now it’s probably no secret that we’re champions of the overlooked genius. I don’t know. Maybe I’m projecting because I think more people ought to pay attention to me and as
Read moreNo one could possibly be THE voice of Gen X, but Cobain was certainly A voice of my generation. In their seminal 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?, published in 1993, Neil Howe and William Strauss argued that the only thing Generation Xers really agreed on was that there was no such thing as Generation X. Given the inherent irony
Read moreLast.FM tells us who we listen to the most. Isn’t that what “favorite” means? We all have our favorite bands. Most of us probably have a lot of favorite bands, in fact, and if you’re like me, that honor has probably been held by different artists throughout your life. My first favorite, back when I was in junior high, was
Read moreSeveral four and five-star releases already, and a boatload of top artists have releases scheduled for later this year – 2014 might wind up as one of the best years for new music in recent memory. Given how many talented artists there are out there making music, pretty much every year is a good year for new releases. Some years,
Read moreNormally I try and show you “official” videos when I write about bands, because that’s where you get the best audio fidelity. I think you’re going to see why I opted for the live vid in this case, though. Sweet lord a’mighty.
Read moreRush’s decision to license “Working Man” to a company that has declared war on American workers is one of the biggest betrayals of trust in Rock history. Yesterday I offered up a brief post wondering what the folks at Walmart were thinking when they chose to use Rush’s iconic “Working Man” as the soundtrack for their ad on investing more
Read moreA few days ago I offered up volume one of stuff that should have been in my best CDs of 2013 note, but wasn’t. So now we arriveth at volume the second, whereupon I apologize to Adam Marsland. Adam has been one of my absolute favorites for a long time. I’m a sucker for the sub-genre we call Power Pop,
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Happens every damned year. It gets to be December and you formulate an idea in your head about the best music of the twelvemonth (I always wanted to use that word in a post). Up through 2012 this resulted in a fairly detailed and often multi-part review of the year’s best CDs. As I noted a few weeks ago, though,
Read moreIt’s easy to see how the mid-1980s Roots revival could have shaped Nashville into something completely different than the wasteland it is today. Not long ago I was lamenting the embarrassing state of Country & Western music, and if you track down through the comments of that post you’ll see a couple folks, including our boy Otherwise, recommending that I
Read moreNewman is pretty darned good. But it’s too early to know if he’s the dude Amy Winehouse or the dude Duffy. A few days ago BuzzFeed up and wet itself over Brit Soul-Pop wunderkind John Newman, calling the 23 year-old singer the “Dude Version Of Amy Winehouse.” As a famous man once said, “simmer down, Beavis.” Comparing Newman to 27-Clubber
Read moreOne more before bedtime. Zevon would have loved it.
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lullaby pit 