Blog: Heartache with Hard Work

Everybody has that one band that they were really into early in high school â€" they’re from your area, hyped locally but never made it big, despite being “so much better than all that mainstream stuff,â€? and most likely they broke up after a couple albums. And you’ve always hoped they would get back together, maybe catch lightning in a jar again. For me, that band is Super Deluxe . They were briefly popular enough to have a couple songs (“She Came Onâ€? and “Famousâ€?) from their first album played on The End (107.7 â€" [...]

Okkervil River writes songs about the downtrodden, the insane, the criminals. And, in doing so, they also write about all of us. These songs are taut with emotion (and REAL emotion, we’re not talking Jimmy Eat World here), heartbreaking at times, overpowering at others. This is a band not afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves, and for that, I love them. It’s easy to be ironically distant, but it’s very difficult to delve deep into what creates misery, loneliness, and pain and really explore the meanings. Any discussion of [...]

Johnny Boy is Lolly and Davo. They’re very British, very punk (in all the best ways), and more in tune with what makes a perfect pop song than pretty much anyone. Their website describes them as “Sandanista-era Clash having a shootout with Phil Spector.� That seems about right, except this is music Phil Spector only wishes he could have made. Earlier this year, I probably would have called them one of my top 20 favorite artists of all time. Which isn’t saying all that much, except that, at the time, I had only heard [...]

Now that I have created a blog, I thought it would be nice to go through some of my favorite bands, especially those who don't get all that much popular airplay. While Carissa's Wierd is not my absolute favorite band (The Beatles, of course, and maybe a few others would come first), they're definitely my favorite band that it always frustrates me that no one seems to know about. The genre of music I most like has been described as "sad boys and girls with guitars" by more than one person over the [...]

I've been compiling my "favorite new music of 2005" list, and in doing so discovered just how many great music blogs there are out there. For some reason, this inspired me to want to add one of my own. I don't usually find myself with the time or resources to aquire all that much new music so I'm not really sure what I think I can contribute, but I wrote a fairly extensive list, so I might as well post it. It was only supposed to be the top 10, but things [...]

I've been compiling my "favorite new music of 2005" list, and in doing so discovered just how many great music blogs there are out there. For some reason, this inspired me to want to add one of my own. I don't usually find myself with the time or resources to aquire all that much new music so I'm not really sure what I think I can contribute, but I wrote a fairly extensive list, so I might as well post it. It was only supposed to be the top 10, but things [...]