In 2005, pop music was rock music. Between Kelly Clarkson’s tarted-up “Since U Been Gone,” Ashlee Simpson’s raspy, Courtney Love-after-a-bender vocals and Hilary Duff’s collabs with her Good Charlotte boy toy Joel Madden, even the biggest Top 40 starlets liked their guitars cranked up to a sassy 11. Elsewhere, rockers…
Although Decemberists vocalist Colin Meloy went on a solo tour this past winter, Picaresque, the Portland, Oregon, band’s third album, is arguably its lushest yet. The nuanced production of Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla finally matches Meloy’s obsession with detail: Horns, strings and accordion drift in and out of…
What Death Cab for Cutie does best on its major-label debut, Plans, is capture flashbulb moments of melancholy — the dissolution of a summer romance, growing apart from a lover, being dumped by an egotistical jerk — and analyze them with astounding honesty. Take the tear-inducing “What Sarah Said.” Solitary…
In a recent New York Times article that disputes the age-old link between creativity and depression, author Peter D. Kramer claims that it is “depression — and not resistance to it or recovery from it — that diminishes the self.” Devoted acolytes of Nine Inch Nails major-domo Trent Reznor would…
In 2004, the line between indie and mainstream rock disintegrated even faster than Britney Spears’ quickie Vegas marriage. Vinyl obsessives mingled with white-hat-wearing fratheads at Modest Mouse shows, Taking Back Sunday debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard charts, and Death Cab for Cutie earned OC-sanctioned buzz and a major-label…
Good Charlotte is one of the biggest bands in the U.S. right now, a pop-punk quintet that’s played the MTV Video Music Awards, graced the cover of Rolling Stone, and sold more than three million copies of its last disc, The Young and the Hopeless. To Good Charlotte vocalist Joel…
69 Love Songs, the Magnetic Fields’ three-disc adventure in pop-music dilettantism, was the point where the antiquated past (jazz, blues, standards, chamber music) crashed into the space-age future (synth-pop). Five years after 69, on his band’s seventh disc, MF front man Stephin Merritt has ditched synthesizers completely — an unfortunate…
Although prefab teen pop is no longer a dominant force in the cultural Zeitgeist, the idea of authenticity still overshadows the popular canon. Are shaggy hipster bands really starving Lower East Side garage rats, or does Daddy bankroll their bohemian, post-liberal arts lifestyle? Do pretty girls still validate the whines…
Major labels must have been dozing in class the day their teachers covered the wisdom of philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” How else to explain nü metal, which amounted to little more than the mutated hellspawn of late-’80s hair bands? Or…
