Pearl Season

Pearl Season

For as long as I can remember there has been a single album that acts as my annual soundtrack to the three month stretch from mid-August through mid-November. It comes on as the summer heat slowly dissipates during the late summer evenings of the northeastern United...

Everything Was in Its Right Place

I traveled back to the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia for the second of two arena shows in less than five days. This time it was for Radiohead’s 2018 summer tour. Since OK Computer (1997) I’ve been a moderate fan, loosely following the band over the...

Shiny and Oh So Bright

The Smashing Pumpkins 2018 Shiny and Oh So Bright tour features a three-hour marathon retrospective of the first ten years of the band’s recorded output from Gish (1991) to Machina/The Machine of Gods (2000). The show was inspired by the return of James Iha, the...

Rook (mostly) Solo and Why It Matters

Here’s an example of what’s inherently good about the Internet. Ten years ago I heard a new album from a band that I had grown fond of in the years prior. The band was (and still is) called Shearwater. When I first heard Winged Life (2004), the band was a side project...

New Gently Beautiful Songs from Mazzy Star

There’s something really remarkable about the impact of Mazzy Star’s music despite a very thin catalog with a vast majority (three full length studio albums) being released between 1991 and 1996. Threads of the band’s signature sound have been woven into the output of...