Category: What We’re Into – Recent Interest

On his new album, “Colors,” Beck delivers a perfect pop statement. This is by far his most conventionally mainstream album to date, working with the modern-pop template and elevating it in the process. Singles “Dreams,” ”Wow” and “Up All Night” have all been floating around a while now, so this shift should not come as…

M.C. Taylor has always been a songwriter unafraid to mark the starkest contrasts of human emotion. In an interview with The Washington Post last November, Taylor described his last record Heart Like a Levee as a “reflecting pool” for people to view their own emotions in his words and music. This symbolic depiction of audience…

On “Concrete and Gold” Foo Fighters reflect the entire timeline of the classic-rock format; there are clear homages to the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen, glam, thrash and grunge. But the band has a new producer, Greg Kurstin, who has collaborated with Adele, Pink and Beck. And with him, Foo Fighters now shuffle genres,…

As rock superstars fade from the glare of fame into the shrouds of nostalgia, a few find ways to keep connecting. It’s not easy: Talent is critical but more important is honesty. This is especially true when the end of one’s path comes into view, when that road no longer stretches past the horizon but…

“Queens of the Stone Age” always sounded like the best glam-band name ever, and while Josh Homme’s free-ranging heavy rock hypnotists were never quite that, they come as close as ever on Villains. “I was born in the desert May 17, in ’73” Homme declares on the opener, “Feet Don’t Fail Me” – which is…

Ray Wylie Hubbard is an iconoclast of the highest order. Early on, Jerry Jeff Walker recorded his song “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother”, which was enough to give him lifetime membership in the outlaw country club. Not much later, he was associated with “progressive country”, particularly for his early years with his band the…

David Rawlings has made a career out of a sort of unassuming generosity. Though he’s led his own band, the Dave Rawlings Machine, he’s spent much of his adult life supporting the work of bigger names like Old Crow Medicine Show, Bright Eyes and Ryan Adams, who covered Rawlings’ song “To Be Young (Is To…

Set to join the list of iconic live albums of the modern Rock era, Jam band supergroup Hard Working Americans bring listeners We’re All in This Together on August 4, 2017. Consisting of members from Widespread Panic, Chris Robinson Brotherhood, and Great American Taxi. they pool the talents of bassist Dave Schools, drummer Duane Trucks,…

Arcade Fire’s fifth LP Everything Now opens with its title track, twice. The first version, logged under the name “Everything_Now (Continued),” lasts for just under one woozy minute, and it in no way prepares the listener for what’s to come. When the dirgelike intro gives way to the full five-minute “Everything Now,” the explosion of…