Four Year Strong
In Some Way, Shape or Form

We really should have seen this coming.

A phenomenon exists that seems to strike a disproportionate amount of “Scene” bands that are on the cusp of breaking through to the masses. Almost universally, there comes a moment where a band is preparing to break the glass ceiling of being a club band and moving up the food chain to opening for the Foo Fighters or headlining theatres. This moment comes after their mid-level breakthrough album comes out and is widely regarded by its fans as a classic - think Brand New’s Deja Entendu. The band is then faced...

Megadeth
Th1rt3en

Here in the Midwest, fall is a time of great comfort to me. The local football team is on the verge of convincing us they’re great before a spectacular November collapse, the Roller Dam Brewery releases a limited run of their delicious Pumpkin Ale, the weather is at that perfect temperature where it’s just brisk enough to warrant an extra blanket, and horror movies come back in vogue for a brief two week period. I spent what is almost certainly a clinically abnormal amount of time watching horror movies as a youngster, and my favorite franchise was always A Nightmare on Elm Street. I loved the fact that despite the overall effect of franchising on a truly disturbing character, the series always had a seriously talented group at its core. Robert Englund gave us one...

Metallica and Lou Reed
Lulu

Inside the listening room of MegaRich Studios in the Hollywood Hills, the final strains of a song that had achieved the unthinkable feat of sounding exactly like two entirely separate songs from different genres, different ages and different universes being played at the same time with no real regard for landing on the beat were playing out, shivering around the richly decorated room, infecting the upholstery and warping the wallpaper. Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield sat side by side on the plush reclining sofa positioned in front of a collection of enormous speakers, nodding in time to the music - Kirk in time to one part of it, James to the other - wearing sunglasses and sniffing frequently as though they had both contracted a particularly snotty strain of man flu. When it finally finished and the room almost audibly breathed a sigh of relief the two giants of rock were uncharacteristically silent aside from the snivels....

New Found Glory
Radiosurgery

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the past few months wondering whether pop-punk is dead or if I’m just too old to enjoy a genre I loved as a younger man. Most of the bands that I cut my musical teeth on are either long-since gone / as good as dead, or they’ve moved on to the more ‘adult’ pastures that spell doom for the groups that made a mint on the problems of the young. New Found Glory played a unique, if brief, role in that maturation process - I can vividly remember tear-assing down Highway 30 in a beat-up Chevy Astro to get drumheads with fellow bandmates while listening to Sticks and Stones, and I still have the burned copy of...

Tom Waits
Bad As Me

We re-join Tom Waits after his seven year hiatus from original studio material and find him embroiled in what sounds like some sort of mobster car chase shootout in 1930s Chicago which has collided with the Whacky Racers AGM in the city. "Chicago" is all standing on running boards firing machine guns and hanging on to your hats. The deep horns swell to turn the opening track from Bad As Me into quite the thrill ride and it made me realise just how much Tom and his own brand of kookiness has been missed. Sure, it was nice to have some luxury packaged rarities and live albums over the last few years but they never felt as rounded as a real Tom Waits studio album.

Orphans didn't work for me as it attempted to compartmentalize Wait's unique sound, dividing the ballads from the rockers and the rockers from the obscurities so that each Waitsian sub-genre had its own disc in which to breathe....

Skeletonwitch
Forever Abomination

When we last spoke with Skeletonwitch, guitarist Scott Hedrick whetted our appetites for what would later be titled Forever Abomination in what I assumed was a fairly standard manner. He said:

“In a certain sense, it’s not like we’re doing anything drastically different, but, it’s maybe a little....Put it this way. Some people tend to prefer

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M83
Hurry Up, We're Dreaming

I had a big weekend planned last weekend; a night out with all of my old friends from university, assembled from all over the globe to say bon voyage to my best friend in the world who is leaving England soon to start up a new life in the Netherlands; a visit to my home town to have Sunday lunch with my girlfriend's grandparents; rugby world cup matches, supporting Wales now that England have been knocked out (for all the good it did them); and finally a gig with my band where we were to play alongside such has-been luminaries as the singer from Duran Duran (allegedly, I haven't had visual confirmation that that happened) and X-Factor also rans (who happily drew a smaller crowd than we did!).

So it was with a heavy heart that I took on this assignment, but our boss here at TMC, Danny, can be a real slave-driver sometimes and he called on me at the last minute to give this a spin and pass judgement...

DJ Shadow
The Less You Know the Better

Was anyone else a little disappointed to find out that Paul was the Walrus? Not because of any particular dislike for the most baby-faced of the Fab Four or indeed his serial wedding obsession but because once the mystery behind the whole kookie character of the walrus had been removed all that remains is the guy who committed the crime of “The Frog Chorus” in a pretty naff looking fluffy walrus costume. Equally let’s see a show of hands from those who stopped caring about the X-Files when they started presenting more answers than questions rather than the other way around.

As I suspected; for many of us, what makes something fascinating and as such perhaps even a little more worthwhile, is our lack of knowledge about that thing. Conspiracy theories, UFO cover-ups and the Bermuda triangle would soon drop out of internet chat room discussions once whoever has the...

Mastodon
The Hunter

In many ways, The Hunter is the album that Mastodon has been building toward ever since the release of Leviathan. On that album, the band declared that they would not be bound to the sludgy roar of their debut Remission by beginning to blend wild psychedelic and progressive elements in with the raw fury present in their prior work. With each subsequent album, the band pushed themselves further and further into that...

Feist
Metals

Leslie Feist is another jewel Canada has spun out, performing everything from amazing duets with the likes of Wilco, Emily Haines, Brendan Canning, and the magnificent Norwegian duo of Erlend Řye & Eirik Glambek Bře of Kings of Convenience to her own beautifully haunting solo act.

Metals, being her comeback album after taking a four year hiatus since The Reminder, lives up to her talent and has that idiosyncratic voice that has kept listeners intrigued and coming back for more. It takes you away right from the first song "The Bad in Each Other", where it starts with a rhythmic drum beat that leads you to her melodic tones and upbeat chorus, to the fifth track "A Commotion" that has a backing beat that will excite you and even surprise you with the group shouts and chattering guitars. It follows with her repeating the line "If it rips you...

Blink-182
Neighborhoods

Nostalgia always complicates matters.

My favorite stand-up comedian Doug Stanhope once said “Old people look back at the good ol’ days, and it was good because they were young...but they act like it was the day”. It’s wrapped up in a longer tirade about medical marijuana, but that one sentence succinctly sums up the problems with nostalgia. Can we ever be sure that what meant the most to us at a young age ever held any merit? Is it just the associations of the music with the experiences that makes us cling to these songs and memories? I don’t know the answer to that question, but the release of Blink-182’s “Up All Night” after an eight year hiatus raised the idea in my mind. ...