Alice In Chains Get Atmospheric With The Grunge on Rainier Fog

Alice In Chains' sixth album, Rainier Fog, delivers more of their inspired signature metallic yet melodic grunge. This time with a twist, even if the riffs feel slightly stale. 

Today Is The Greatest: 25 Years of Listening To Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream

 

Most music fans of my generation can tell you where they were when they heard Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for the first time, especially if they weren't already a denizen of the Pacific Northwest and organically attached to the Puget Sound music scene. I wasn't. So, yeah, I can tell you not only where I was but what I was doing the first time I heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit." I can also tell you where I was and what I was doing the first time I heard "Even Flow." Finally, I can tell you where I was and what I was doing when I first heard "Cherub Rock" by Smashing Pumpkins.

Review: Soundgarden King Animal

After disbanding 16 years ago, and pursuing their own projects and gigs in other bands, Soundgarden has reunited and released their first album in a long time. It might be easy to cynically write off the reunion of a band whose lead singer swore that a reunion would “tarnish their legacy” as a simple middle aged cash grab. The only problem with that assertion is that unlike the multitudes of bands that break up, retire, reunite, and then go through the whole thing over and over again (a la KISS and Ozzy Osborne), Soundgarden have written and recorded some of the best music of their previous and current careers on King Animal.

David Bowie's Legacy of Brilliant Oddity

Only a few artists have been as influential as David Bowie has been over the decades. The influences might not be directly discernible in each and every case, but they are there. Bowie was a talent that took risks, went in a myriad of different directions sonically and displayed a wildly brilliant oddity throughout his career, but at the core remained not only a rock and roll legend, but a rock and roll fan to the end.

The Killers: Battleborn (Review)

The Killers’ lead singer Brandon Flowers is nothing if not a storyteller. Going all the way back to the songs on The Killers’ first album, Hot Fuss, Flowers’ lyrics have told the stories of guys hustling to get androgynous looking girls’ numbers at the local club, obsessive compulsive (almost stalkerish) lovers on the outside and a girl named Jenny who was a friend of his. On Sam’s Town, the stories kept coming about girls who pine for “beautiful boys” to come and rescue them, even if they “didn’t look like Jesus.” On The Killers’ new album, Battle Born, Flowers keeps up the penchant for storytelling. This time out though, the music that The Killers composed as a band fits his stories more completely than it ever has.

MUSE "Dead Inside" and "Psycho" Singles

The Ear has been a huge fan of MUSE since hearing and seeing "Hysteria" on FUSE (remember when that music station didn't suck?). Yeah, I might have been a little late to the band, but "better late than never" as they say. Over the next few albums, MUSE found international success, in rather large part to a single being included on a Twilight movie soundtrack. Yeah, let's just forget about that and focus on the great music and thematic elements that made MUSE so great in the first place. Absolution, the album "Hysteria" was part of, was a powerful trip down the rock/concept album highway. An album full of songs about about the coming apocalypse (of various origins) that mankind is always rushing headlong towards while desperately attempting to avoid still ranks as the band's most complete, cohesive, and captivating album, thematically and musically. After hearing the first two singles from their new upcoming rock/concept album though, I'm thinking that the glory days of Absolution are once again returning to one of the most interesting rock bands of the last 20 years.  

20 Years of Superunknown

By March 8th 1994, grunge, as a mainstream sensation, had little over a year and a half of commercial success left in its grimy fuel tanks. Kurt was gone, the flannel was fading, and somewhere No Doubt were recording their breakthrough album Tragic Kingdom, the album that would usher in the ska-swing mainstream sensation. It was a sensation that would last a few years and then the record labels would move on to electronica (Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, and The Crystal Method) in search of the next “new rock revolution” that they could get on the ground floor of. When neither of these semi-organic genre explosions panned out, it was decided that the best way to capture the revenues from a new mainstream sensation was to just make one up for the masses, and the national music scene quickly devolved from thoughtful, introspective, and often activism fueled organic rock, to...Britney Spears.