Category: Rock (Page 130 of 241)

Golden Animals: Free Your Mind and Win a Pony

June 27, 2008 / Jeff Giles

How you feel about Golden Animals – and their debut full-length album, Free Your Mind and Win a Pony — will likely have everything to do with how you feel about Jim Morrison and the Doors. Are you a Morrison fan? Well, then Pony will hit you like a peyote button at a desert campfire. If, on the other hand, you regard the Doors as possibly the most overrated band in rock & roll history, then Golden Animals will sound a lot like the low rumble of a slowly opening hellmouth. (And if you’re Ian Astbury, you’re about to spend several months memorizing the words to these songs and waiting for singer Tommy Eisner to quit the band so you can take his place.) Either way, Pony does everything it can to live up to the label’s promises of a “sun-bleached, spare and deeply California desert sound” – and at 11 songs and barely 30 minutes in length, it’s hard to accuse the album of overstaying its welcome. There isn’t an original thought from start to finish – even the artwork strains to evoke the Laurel Canyon wonder years – but that won’t stop a rabid throng of critics from wanking all over it this summer. That these knuckleheads don’t have a scrap of mojo worth rising between them doesn’t matter in the least. (Happy Parts 2008)

Golden Animals MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Rock

Various Artists: Music from the Motion Picture The Love Guru

June 20, 2008 / David Medsker

Mike Myers’ latest “comedy” about an American-born, India-raised self-help guru will surely go down as one of the year’s worst movies (read BE movie critic Jason Zingale’s one-and-a-half-star review here), and for the sake of consistency, Lakeshore Records issued an equally bad soundtrack to go with it. This is instrument-of-torture bad, combining Myers’ Hindu-accented versions of pop songs “9 to 5,” “More Than Words” and “The Joker” (seriously, who asked for those?) with – sequenced in order, no less – Big Boi, Robbie Nevil, and Celine Dion. There are three dialog tracks peppered throughout; they’re not funny. The only song that rises above the dreck is George Clinton’s “Guru Vindaloo,” with Danny Saber’s “Mathar” not far behind. The rest of the album is an unholy combination of the offensive and the boring. There is no reason for anyone to own this album, and you get the sense that even the distributors of the soundtrack knew it – they misspelled Mike Myers’ name in the artwork for the promotional copies. (Lakeshore Records)

Love Guru soundtrack MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop, Rock, Songs

The New Frontiers: Mending

June 20, 2008 / Jeff Giles

It’s tough to make genuinely beautiful music in the post-ironic world – most bands that try it seem to either fall victim to the temptation to mess it up with inscrutable lyrics and needlessly tricky chord changes (Wilco) or drown in a sea of slick production and Hallmark platitudes (the Fray). Texas’s New Frontiers have drawn comparisons to both bands, but in a strange way, Mending is actually closer to an old Dan Fogelberg or Crosby, Stills and Nash record – the melodies are gorgeous, the harmonies are ethereal, the production is perfectly down to Earth, and on every song, hearts are worn proudly on sleeves. Music this wonderfully open and sincere comes along so rarely that it’s easy to write off the New Frontiers as a bunch of sad-sack posers – easy, that is, until you’re about halfway into the album, at which point you’ll have to check your suspicions at the door and just give in to the music’s beauty. Perfect for rainy days, bruised hearts, and anyone with a weakness for an honest-to-goodness pretty song. Can’t wait to hear what these guys come up with next. (The Militia Group 2008)

The New Frontiers MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop, Rock

Steal This Song: ism, “Sacred Cows”

June 19, 2008 / David Medsker

Anyone who needs a temporary fix to tide them over until Muse drops their next album (rumored to be slated for late fall), this should do the trick. In fact, New York quartet ism are a little too good at the, um, Museisms, to the point where they have little identity of their own to speak of. The title track of their upcoming album, Urgency, takes elements of three Muse songs – “Time Is Running Out,” “Apocalypse Please,” and “Butterflies and Hurricanes” – and rolls them into one. They’re not awful – they just need to figure out who they really are. If there is one takeaway moment from the album, it’s this. And we’re giving it away for free download. Dig in, Museies.

Ism – Sacred Cows (Radio Edit)

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A Kiss Could Be Deadly: A Kiss Could Be Deadly

June 13, 2008 / James B. Eldred

If a kiss is deadly, then that is one intense case of herpes. Still, don’t hate A Kiss Could Be Deadly for their idiotic complete-sentence band name. Hate them for their crap music instead. Instantly forgettable and boring, each song on the band’s self-titled debut features the dangerous one-two punch of bland music and utterly generic and forgettable lyrics which only become memorable when they fall into the realm of self-parody, like on the chorus to the puntastic “Poison IV,” which beings with the line “And you – you’re so cliché.” Irony isn’t strong enough of a word. Lead singer Lauren Baird’s whining howl of a voice doesn’t help things, either. She can’t sing, and no amount of harmonizing keyboards or the ever-so-subtle effect of an auto-tuner is going to hide that. The only thing that makes AKCBD (wow, even their abbreviated name is too long) stand out at all is their reliance on keyboards. But adding annoying synthesizers to annoying pop/punk songs doesn’t make them any better. And their electronic edge will probably be their undoing, as it makes them not emo enough for the emo kids but not electronic enough for the electronic kids either. AKCBD (yeah, that doesn’t stop being annoying) is just Paramore with a keyboard fetish. (LABEL: Metropolis 2008)

A Kiss Could Be Deadly MySpace page

Alternative, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Rock