Email Author Michael Roberts

Awards

• 2009 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published December 11, 2008

  "The Rocky Mountain News is Going Down"

More

2002 Stories by Michael Roberts

• Division of Laura Lee

  published October 3, 2002

  Reviewers seldom gush over discs that remind them of albums made by lousy artists from the past -- hence the dearth of notices praising Shakira... More >>

• Styles, Trinity, Clipse

  published September 19, 2002

  At this point in its development, hip-hop is all about the marketing. Crossing over to the pop side of the street is incredibly lucrative, but... More >>

• Chicago

  published September 12, 2002

  Ask anyone, of any age, to name the first album she or he purchased, and you can bet the disc mentioned will be cool: a classic that's truly stood... More >>

• New Found Glory

  published September 5, 2002

  Anyone who pays the slightest attention to popular music knows that punk rock hasn't been the typical nihilist's soundtrack of choice for many... More >>

• Golden

  published August 22, 2002

  Golden is the most modest indie supergroup imaginable. The band sports an impressive underground pedigree. Alex Minoff, who splits singing and... More >>

• Bruce Springsteen

  published August 15, 2002

  Perhaps the truest line ever written about Bruce Springsteen appeared in Village Voice scribe Robert Christgau's 1975 review of Born to... More >>

• Red Hot Chili Peppers

  published August 1, 2002

  The word "mature" keeps cropping up in positive reviews of this disc —mature songwriting, mature arrangements, mature subject matter, mature... More >>

• Scorched Earth

  published August 1, 2002

  Even before my first spin of Fed to Your Head had ended, I sensed that the album would inspire strongly contradictory feelings,... More >>

• DJ Spooky

  published July 18, 2002

  Optometry is hardly the first album to mingle jazz, hip-hop and DJ culture. Indeed, it's not even the first platter to do so on Thirsty... More >>

• Various artists, Duke Ellington

  published July 11, 2002

  One of the least-used compliments in the average critic's vocabulary is the word "consistent"; few scribes come out of a great concert exclaiming,... More >>

• Polo Montañez

  published June 27, 2002

  Record companies specializing in musical subgenres regularly market certain releases to tourists, literal and otherwise. For instance, blues... More >>

• The Vans Warped Tour

  published June 27, 2002

  When it was launched in 1995, the Warped Tour was one of many multiband bashes — from H.O.R.D.E. to Lilith Fair — that emerged in the... More >>

• Nine Inch Nails

  published March 14, 2002

  Just over a year ago, when U2 was in danger of losing its constituency, the group returned to its roots with All That You Can't Leave... More >>

• The Sunshine Fix

  published February 14, 2002

  These days, Bill Doss, a key member of the Elephant 6 collective and a co-founder of Olivia Tremor Control, likes to refer to himself in print as... More >>

• Faith Evans

  published January 31, 2002

  It's hard to tell where Evans is headed at this point, given the many directions in which she's been tugged throughout her career. She began as a... More >>

• Pink Floyd

  published January 10, 2002

  The spectacular pre-holiday sales success of Echoes isn't especially surprising. America is filled with people who greatly enjoyed taking... More >>