The 28th annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees were announced on October 4, 2012, offering a list of 15 groundbreaking artists who have circulated the music scene for a minimum of 25 years, as required for the ballot.
This unprecedented event was further marked by first-time fan voting, which allowed music lovers to vote on their preferred inductees. Though voting was concluded on December 5th, fans don’t have much longer to wait; the total nominations will be revealed sometime in mid-December, serving as a pre-holiday surprise for the musicians who made the selective cut. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony will take place on April 18, 2013 at Los Angeles’s notable Nokia Theatre.
In anticipation of the event, check the list below to revel in the revolutionary talents of the past quarter century:
From doo-wop to prog-rock to gangster rap, the 2013 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees fulfill a wide-range of experimental genres that have surpassed the last two decades; culminating in triumph as musical legends, regardless of the ultimate victor.
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Wolfmother is back! Well, Andrew Stockdale, the lead singer/guitarist of Wolmother is back – everyone else quit/got fired last year and Stockdale decided to continue the Wolfmother name without them. But the new Wolfmother, now a foursome instead of a power trio, doesn’t sound terribly different from the old Wolfmother. So there’s not much need to describe the “sound” of Cosmic Egg: it sounds like Wolfmother. Have you heard “Woman” or “The Joker and the Thief,” from their 2005 self-titled debut? Then you know what you’re in for here. Is that really a problem, though? Sure, Stockdale may just be cribbing the best bits from ’70s metal (specifically, the crunching riffs of Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, the howling screams of Robert Plant, and the totally groovy organ solos of Deep Purple), but what the hell is wrong with that? Have you heard the “modern” rock on the radio today?
Maybe we got it right in 1976 – why move forward? If anything, Wolfmother needs to move further in that direction. When they try to slow things down or pop things up for radio, such as on the anemic love ballad “Far Away,” they sound lost. When they let themselves kick out the jams, they deliver; whether slow and methodical, such as the wah-wah heavy “Sundial,” or fist-pounding and headbanger friendly, like “New Moon Rising,” “Phoenix,” or just about every other song on the album. Yeah, it may not be the most original or “intelligent” release of the year, but it’s a solid dose of hard rock and heavy metal at a time when they’re few and far between.
A quick note of annoyance, though: there are two versions of Cosmic Egg, deluxe and standard (our review copy was the standard edition). The deluxe copy comes with four more songs, which add up to 20 more minutes of music. These aren’t outtakes, live tracks or acoustic versions; there’s nothing notably different about these tunes. So when you’re buying the “standard” version of the record you’re basically not getting the full version. It’s hard to tell what the purpose behind such a release strategy is, since all it does it drive people who bought the standard version to go online and download what they’re missing. It’s hard enough for artists to sell records these days, and crap like this just makes it that much harder. What’s the point? (Modular 2009)
