SOUND BITES

  The prospect of a new Radiohead album is exciting to a lot of people, especially considering their last album (the majestic, orchestral A Moon Shaped Pool ) has been with us for six years now, and every minute that ticks by extends the longest gap fans have gone without a new Radiohead album. Moreover, fans of their more rock-oriented material are now just about fifteen years removed from In Rainbows , the last Radiohead record that found them utilizing rock instrumentation in more or less the way you’d expect them to; and believe me, I know enough about how transcendent they are in terms of genre placement to have to word the previous sentence like that. So, when The Smile (if you weren’t familiar, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood with Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner) dropped their debut single You Will Never Work In Television Again early this year, the slashing guitars and visceral Thom Yorke vocal raised the eyebrows of most Radiohead fans. That pummeling post-pu...

  In recent years, The Black Keys have returned to their prolific ways; after a three year gap leading into 2014’s Turn Blue and a five year gap coming out of it, Dropout Boogie is the duo’s third album in the last three years. Granted, a global pandemic pulled the notoriously hard-touring rockers off the road and one of those albums was a covers record created while cooped up, but it’s still impressive for Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney to be hitting a creative stride twenty years into their career. With their eleventh album, The Black Keys are once again self-producing, continuing the return-to-roots period they ushered in with 2019’s Let’s Rock absent former co-producer and unofficial third member Danger Mouse, who helmed some of their most popular material between 2008 and 2014. That said, the presence here of additional musicians fleshing out the duo’s lineup marks Dropout Boogie as a bit of a departure from some of their previous records; perhaps bolstered by the guest m...

  Over the years, my relationship with mainstream rock has had its share of ups and downs; I’ll never claim to be such a hipster as to recoil in disgust from anything that touches the modern rock radio charts, but I have admittedly grown tired of the chest-pounding, dumbed down "butt rock" that’s been the calling card of mainstream hard rock for the better part of Nickelback’s existence. That said, a cursory glance at some of the more mainstream-leaning bands I’ve covered here in the past will give you an idea of how selective I can be when it comes to this genre. So, while reviewing Halestorm’s fifth album seems like the kind of thing that would lose me cred, I’d argue that a) I never really had that to begin with, and b) this blog has never been about earning cred, it’s about talking about music that interests me; Halestorm may not be a group of visionaries displaying peak artistic integrity, but they write heavy, melodic tunes that hit a guttural sweet spot without resorti...

  After hitting the scene running in early 2019 with The Goat , their highly lauded debut album, Puppy doesn’t hold back on second album Pure Evil . Incorporating elements of grunge, stoner rock, hardcore, metal and so much more, Pure Evil brings the thunder from the jump and rarely lets up. Its thirteen tracks fly by with relative ease over the album’s 35 minute run time, and the UK trio are more apt to get in, do the damage and get out than to let a groove or idea overstay its welcome. Opening intro Shining Star sets the stage nicely, riding a sludgy riff and some ritualistic harmonizing right into the surprising shoegaze/gothic tones of The Kiss . I wasn’t expecting Gish -era Smashing Pumpkins vibes out of the gate, and yet here we are. They’re also developing a rather acute gift for melodies, as they display on the ‘90s-soaked My Offer or the Ghost-like chorus of Wasted Little Heart . There’s also a slight reprieve at the album’s midpoint by way of the pretty, plucky instrum...

  When it comes to Arcade Fire, reading an opinion like “their best album since The Suburbs ” can be a very exciting thing to hear. After all, the collective’s third album is considered by many to be their magnum opus, and one that came out a dozen years ago at that. So, hearing someone say that implies a grand return to form, an attempt to recapture some of the goodwill they had at their zenith; as if to say, after a lost decade messing with their sound and their fan base, Arcade Fire was back . The thing about that statement is, while it’s technically true, it says less about Arcade Fire’s heyday than it does about the two albums that followed The Suburbs as the group crawled through the ‘10s; Reflektor released in 2013 as an overstuffed and meandering attempt at following bold new pathways, while 2017’s Everything Now was hampered by a borderline-disastrous, oversaturating promotional campaign and a dumbed-down presentation that spoke to the rampant consumerism of our modern s...

  Inviting comparisons to your band's best work when talking up a new album is a dangerous exercise for anyone, but it's on a whole other level when you're in Bloc Party and the work you're drawing parallels from your new album to is Silent Alarm , the 2005 post-punk masterpiece that basically perfected the band's approach the first time out. They would spend the next three records running away from the sound they helped start a miniature British invasion with in the mid-aughts, incorporating more and more electronics into their sound before imploding the band with the gnarled, heavy overcorrection of Four in 2012 (I liked it personally, but I'm in the minority there). Not long after that, the rhythm section would be replaced as Kele Okereke and Russell Lissack created Bloc Party's divisive fifth album on computers; Hymns failed to register much of any goodwill upon release, and it feels like much longer than six years since Bloc Party's attempted reintr...

  Fontaines D.C. have come a long way in a short time; barely a year removed from a post-punk debut that garnered loads of attention and immediately pigeonholed them as a young, feisty band on the rise, they'd already started looking to broaden their horizons and seek new influences on their 2020 sophomore record, A Hero's Death . It might not have stuck with fans in the same way Dogrel did, but in retrospect it seems like a necessary recalibration heading into third record Skinty Fia . With most of the band now having relocated to London from Dublin, Skinty Fia deals with not only the pressures of adjusting to a new home, but also the pressures of expectation; after watching their star rise so quickly in the UK and gaining plenty of followers on this side of the Atlantic, it feels as though Fontaines D.C. are continuing to discover themselves. Further exploring darker, moodier textures and elements of new wave and shoegaze, with Skinty Fia the group create even more artistic...