Album review: The Trews
Late last year, Canadian rockers The Trews launched a PledgeMusic campaign to fund their next album. Contrary to popular crowd funding site Kickstarter, PledgeMusic is more about artists building connections…
Album Review: “Elvis at Stax” is pure gold
I’ve always mentally split Elvis’s career in 3 sections: The rocking 50’s, the movie years and the Vegas years, when he turned into a fat parody of himself. I love…
Album review: The Winery Dogs
It’s a full time job keeping track of Mike Portnoy‘s every single project, especially since his departure from Dream Theater. The hardest working drummer in rock teams up this time…
All roads lead to Sabbath: Revisiting Ozzy Osbourne’s “Speak of the Devil”
Ozzy Osbourne’s Speak of the Devil album (or Talk of the Devil if you’re in the UK) is the black sheep of his discography, having been disowned by the singer…
50 years ago today: The Beatles released their first album
50 years ago, a promising young band from Liverpool released their first album. After the initial success of their first 2 singles “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me“, the…
Album Review: Steven Wilson – The Raven That Refused to Sing
Steven Wilson is a busy man. When he’s not fronting Porcupine Tree, he’s busy remixing (sometimes in 5.1) the back catalog of King Crimson and Jethro Tull, producing/mixing for Swedish…
You never forget your first… record. Or “How a record changed the course of my life”
I got into rock at a very young age. I was 5 or 6 years old when my parents let me play records on an old portable turntable. I played…
The album: are reports of its death exaggerated or even relevant?
Are albums still relevant? This week, one of the last holdout bands showed up on iTunes. AC/DC had refused to have their music sold digitally for years. but finally made…
Music as a commodity (a prologue)
This is just a quick post for tonight. I’ll eventually have much more to say about the devaluation of recorded music, but I wanted to share something I encountered this…