My Favorite Pop Album of 2018
I can’t remember the first time I heard Still Corners, but I’m guessing it was long before I knew who they were. I believe it was through a Pandora channel for a similar band, maybe Beach House or Daughter, but the track the first struck me was “The Trip” from their...
My Favorite Instrumental Album of 2018
I have friends (you know who you are) that pay a lot of attention to new music that comes out every month, week, or even day. For a time I felt like I was a slacker for not being able to keep up. I would find myself defaulting back to records that I’ve loved for...
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 next decade....
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...