Label: Silber Records Released: September 2015 Hiroshi Sugimoto took a lot of blurry photographs. Some are hauntingly beautiful and others just evade my understanding. It’s hard to say that the latter fails, so much as it seems that I have failed. So it is with Yellow6’s “photographs” as well. The stated goal of No Memories, Just Photographs is to express… Read more »
Label: Image Entertainment Released: September 14, 2010 Some documentaries are for casual fans, others are for more serious fans and others are almost for musicians themselves. This one falls into the latter two categories. There is a bit of narrative that takes him from childhood to the London of 1967 and a bit more that surrounds his death, but the… Read more »
Released: September 14, 2010 Label: Rounder Records A couple years back, so-called Led Zeppelin fans were disappointed by Robert Plant’s decision to forgo any full-fledged Led Zeppelin reunion. Of course, any truly discerning fan who has taken a good listen to Plant’s solo career, particularly the three albums preceding Band of Joy, including his 2007 collaboration with Allison Krauss, should… Read more »
“I got rock ‘n’ roll, to save me from the cold And if that’s all there is, it ain’t so bad.” – Motorhead, “Rock n Roll” When I first heard those words in 1987, they resonated with me. I was a lonely kid with only a few friends and no real expectation that life held much for me outside of… Read more »
Label: self-released Released: April 20, 2010 Campaign’s It Likes to Party EP is as full of gritty half-harmonies and beer-soaked melodies as any punk rock out there. The tunes are raw and in your face with hooks sneaking in that almost require a singalong. There is a certain drunkenness to this record, yet it is not steeped in the stupidity… Read more »
Released: August 17, 2010 Label: UMe After waning over the last couple of albums during Bruce Dickinson’s first stint, two ill-conceived releases with Blaze Bayley and a lackluster return for Dickinson on Brave New World, Iron Maiden stormed back to life with their last two albums and an outstanding tour documentary. Perhaps no other band in their third decade could… Read more »
Released: August 24, 2010 Label: Black Numbers It seems like a strong sense of melody is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the raw, tattered edges of pure passion, but the two do in fact occasionally find common ground…like they do on Go Rydell’s The Golden Age. What’s particularly interesting is how the band’s sense of both melody… Read more »
Released: June 29, 2010 Label: No Sleep Records Frontier(s), featuring Elliott / Falling Forward front man Chris Higdon, offers two strong tracks on this 7″ that are reminiscent of TSOL’s often under-appreciated mid-80s period where their meanderings into art punk began to take on a bit of a hard rock edge. In fact, this EP’s dark, haunting sound would have… Read more »
Merriweather Post Pavilion Columbia, MD July 20, 2010 Despite the encroachment of corporate sponsors (which in this case is not really as bad as it sounds) and the shift away from its old “punk rock summer camp” ethos that dominated my first run of attendance (1997-2002), the last three years have still been a lot of fun and I’ve seen… Read more »
Andrew WK @ Warped Tour 2010 Merriweather Post Pavilion Columbia, MD July 20, 2010