Blog: Viva La Mainstream!

It's a few days later than I intended, and I'm sure after I post it I'm going to curse myself for forgetting one, but here it is, VLM's Essential Albums of 2010. As usual, these aren't ranked, there's no particular order to the list, just a rundown of the albums that made 2010 a solid year for music. Free Energy – Stuck on Nothing In reading the Best of 2010 lists, I was most disappointed to see that Free Energy got snubbed so frequently. When Stuck on Nothing [...]

• Fitz and the Tantrums - Breakin' The Chains Of Love
• The Gaslight Anthem - Boxer

…um, hello? Is this thing on? Yeah, it’s me, TJ. I’m back. Where the hell have I been, you ask? Well, that’s a valid question. In short, I put Viva La Mainstream on hiatus for the month of December, because I needed to figure out what the hell I was doing. Some of you who know me as something other than a music blogger on the internet know that I do a great many things. Among them, I’m a screenwriter 1 . It’s what I aim to do with the [...]

• The Gaslight Anthem - Miles Davis & The Cool

Tonight marked the announcement of the nominees for the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. For years (for argument's sake, let's say the last 52 years) have been marred by claims that Grammy voters are out of touch and more interested in giving long overdue awards to the greats of yore than celebrating who made the best music of right now. Then last year came around and the ratings grab awards ceremony takes a hard left, showering Taylor Swift in praise and making us all wonder who really thinks The Black Eyed Peas are a musically legitimate anything. [...]

Two years after Fall Out Boy released their last(final?) hit single, lead singer Patrick Stump has released two versions of the first single from his solo album, currently slated for a February 2011 release. Stump's official website currently holds two versions of "Spotlight", one subtitled "New Regrets" and the other "Oh Nostalgia". The site offers free mp3s of both tracks (after jumping through multiple hoops on Facebook) and an opportunity for fans to vote on which they prefer. Listen to both versions of the song below. Patrick Stump - Spotlight (New Regrets) [...]

Alternate title for this post: Why I Never Read the Book Before I See the Movie. OK, so before I get taken out back and killed by the fanboys, I want to make it clear that I loved Scott Pilgrim vs. The World . After sadly not being able to see it in theatres, I was worried that I was building up insurmountable hype in my head. But after two viewings it's still one of the best things I've seen this year (alongside Inception and Kick-Ass [...]

If you saw the iTunes homepage this morning, you probably saw a cryptic page touting an announcement tomorrow at 10AM. The geeks and Apple fanboys 1 saw this and immediately went into a tizzy. Speculation was abound that Apple was finally going to unveil a cloud-based streaming service, or perhaps a subscription plan similar to Rhapsody or Rdio. More measured predictions involved the long-rumored 90 second song previews. But a couple hours ago Billboard and The Wall Street Journal made an announcement that resonated on a different level. After nearly ten [...]

Fun fact, boys and girls: "Whataya Want From Me", the hit single from  American Idol alum Adam Lambert, was actually written by P!nk and intended for her most recent album Funhouse . Her version of the song was recorded during the sessions for that album, but never made the cut, and the song was eventually given to Lambert for his debut record. Well, now that P!nk is prepping her first greatest hits compilation for release in a matter of days, that lost recording of hers is coming to the surface. P!nk's take on Lambert's hit [...]

I don't care about MTV's European Music Awards any more than I care about the VMAs. Neither of them mean much of anything, except in the rare instance when a high-profile performer fails to exercise some self-control. But video of performances from the EMAs have been circulating, and I felt like sharing two of them. First, we've got B.o.B. and Paramore's Hayley Williams performing one of the fantastic, albeit inescapable, hits from this past summer. Check out the live performance of "Airplanes" below. To all ye detractors who suggest that Ms. Williams relies on pitch correction or that [...]

To expand on something I tweeted earlier today: What if I told you there was a band that sounded like the love child of Daft Punk and Rush that wrote concept albums re-imagining the story of MegaMan? Is that something you might be interested in? If the answer to that was 'no', I would advise you to consult with a doctor, because you might be legally dead and unaware of such a fact. For everyone else, may I present to you The Protomen. Since [...]

In the early days of his G.O.O.D. Friday series, Kanye West announced that he and his mentor, none other than Jay-Z, were working on an album entitled Watch the Throne . Earlier this week the duo shed a little bit more light on their progress. As of right now, Hova and Yeezy have recorded about 8 tracks for the album, among them G.O.O.D. Friday contributions "Monster", "So Appalled" and "The Joy". In an interview with New York's Hot 97, the duo announced plans to drop the first single (title unknown) from the record on New [...]

With just inside three weeks until the release of their fourth studio album, My Chemical Romance have debuted the third song (second single) from Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys . Check out "Sing" below. My Chemical Romance - Sing While "Na Na Na" was a breath of fresh air from MCR, they've since followed it up with a double dose of mediocrity. "The Only Hope for Me is You" sounded like 30 Seconds to Mars [...]

NPR is now streaming 15 songs from The Promise , a 2-disc collection of B-sides and outtakes from Bruce Springsteen's classic 1978 record Darkness on the Edge of Town . The 2-disc album will hit stores November 16, and will also be available as part of a deluxe reissue of Darkness on the Edge of Town . This release also coincides with the recent debut of The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town , which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last month and is currently airing on HBO. [...]

OK, I know I'm about a year late to the party on this one, but I just watched this movie for the first time last night. I had heard from any number of sources that this was a great movie, but circumstance only allowed me the chance to see it now. Most of the things I love about (500) Days of Summer are the things that everyone else goes bonkers over. The fragmented narrative as Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who couldn't be further removed from his 3rd Rock from the Sun days 1 [...]

While the Foo Fighters have been tweeting and Facebooking mini updates from Studio 606 as they record their next album, today frontman Dave Grohl went on Zane Lowe's program on BBC Radio 1 to give a few firmer updates. First, the Foo Fighters will be playing two shows at the Milton Keynes Bowl in July 2011. Supporting them on these dates will be Scottish alternative act Biffy Clyro, plus Death Cab for Cutie and Jimmy Eat World on one date each. These are the only known dates for the Foo Fighters in 2011, but somehow I doubt Dave [...]

Come Around Sundown might be Kings of Leon's fifth studio album, but with all the pressure and anticipation surrounding the follow-up to the smash hit Only by the Night , it might as well have been the band's second. KoL were faced with a lot of the same choices that a breakout band sees right after their debut album. Do they decide not to fix what ain't broke and rehash their previous successes, or do they try to evolve and learn from their past? Lucky for the Followhill clan, they had four albums prior to this one to [...]

You might have noticed a lack of blogging over the last few weeks. Yes, I'm still interested in continuing blogging for the foreseeable future, but over the last few weeks I've been doing less listening and more viewing. For better and for worse, I've been watching more film and television and not doing as much serious music listening. So rather than let this new interest take away from VLM, let's go ahead and make the announcement that starting with this post Viva La Mainstream now covers film and television. So with that out of the way, check out our first [...]

So for the last week I've been taking a bit of a hiatus from blogging while I take care of a few other things, but I'm back tonight with a look at what might be the best concert I've been to this year. Last night Jimmy Eat World rolled into Philadelphia in support of their sixth studio album Invented , and over the course of an hour and a half, the band put together one of the tightest, most dynamic live shows I've seen in some time. Stringing together tracks from every album since Clarity [...]

Earlier today Kanye West announced some of the details of his fifth studio album on his Twitter, and it seemed like the entire music world came to a hush long enough to hear what he had to say. The details of the album are listed below: The album is called My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy It will be out Nov. 22 Among the songs slated to be on the album: "Power", "Runaway" (which you can hear below), "Lost in the World" and "All of the Lights", which leaked earlier [...]

So if you missed it earlier this week, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score to The Social Network is now available . I haven't reviewed it yet because I'm holding out hope that I'll get to see the film this weekend, at which point I'll tether my soundtrack review to a review of the film. But if you were to download the soundtrack, you'd hear the gem below, Reznor & Ross's take on "In The Hall of the Mountain King". So here it is, your Moment of Zen. Trent Reznor and Atticus [...]

Tonight Eminem dropped the video for Recovery' s third single "No Love". The video features Eminem and his cohort Lil Wayne, who isn't about to let something silly like a jail stint get in the way of being obscenely prolific (Dude also dropped an EP on Tuesday, and is rumored to release an album on the day of his release). "No Love" acts as a call to action for anyone who's ever been bullied to stand up to their adversaries. Not exactly the most constructive of messages, though I'd rather see more of [...]