This is an extremely generous review. It is nice that Berry's final album doesn't try to do too much, but there are no great songs here (though "Dutchman" comes close), and the production is a little creaky. I enjoy it for what it is, but a very good or great album it is not.

I just saw the movie with my daughter this afternoon. I thought it was a solid, fairly entertaining movie — I'd give a B. Unlike the reviewer, I thought Samberg was a big reason for why the movie was fun. His comic rhythms worked well and he and Katie Crown work well off of each other. And the many site gags with the…

The novel was really bad. The Gone Girl comparisons seemed to be more the product of marketing than anything actually contained in the respective novels. This sounds like a faithful adaptation, so this type of review is what I expected.

Lydia writes some great, hard hitting lyrics that are unsparing about everyone, including herself. But her last two albums have sanded off the rough edges off of her sound. This really diminishes the energy. And without the energy found on her earlier work, it is clear that there isn't much to many of her songs, which…

The mention of St. Vincent is apt, as John Congleton, who produced her last album, also manned the boards for this one. And it shows in the highly stylized sound, compression, and, as the reviewer notes "negative space." This is probably the best Wild Beasts album to date.

One of my favorite eps so far — so many big laughs.

A few comments:

During the early '80s, it was almost obligatory for a band to make some commentary on possible nuclear warfare. Heck, XTC has two such songs on their album The Big Express, one from Andy Partridge ("This World Over") and the other from Colin Moulding ("I Remember the Sun"). Another good one from that era was Midnight…

No — CDs aren't a fetish item in Japan. They just happen to be more popular. As of a couple years ago, that was also true of Germany. I wonder if being a hipster is as important in other cultures as it is here in the bastion of consumerism.

Wow — these writers miss a whole bunch of things. First off, a well-mastered CD sounds great (I'm amazed by how many people dis the sound on CDs as a general fact, when the evidence does not back that up. Often these are the same people who go nuts for a Blu-ray edition of a favorite movie that they play on their…

Sure, the Stones have some influence on the Southern rock bands of the '70s. But if you listen to Skynyrd, they were much more strongly inspired by bands like The Who and Free, and The Marshall Tucker Band comparison is extremely forced. The Marshall Tucker Band was much more into jazz and straight country — they…

It's probably no surprise that the influencer sllightly dominates over the influenced in this collaboration. The album is an essay of many, but not all of, the styles that the Maels have dabbled in for over four decades, with only a few tracks seeming more Franz Ferdinand dominant. They definitely mesh together well,…

As great as "Something" is, the best Beatles song that starts with an 'S' is "Strawberry Fields Forever".

You could only come up with 13 songs on this topic? You must have had to rush this out. The absence of "Amateur Hour" by Sparks shows a lack of thought was put into this topic: "It's a lot like playing the violin/you can not start off and be Yehudi Menuhin." The lack of Sparks songs in general in your Inventory pieces…

I forgot how great the final scene of the final episode of M*A*S*H was — it almost made up for awful the rest of that episode was. (Perhaps because of its record ratings, there has been some revisionism, touting the final ep as a classic, but it was pretty well panned immediately after it aired, as it was the most…

A worthy film to conclude this series. It is flawed in a number of ways, but very resonant. I take (minor) issue with your comparison of the movie to XTC's "Dear God", as songwriter Andy Partridge famously insisted it not be included on Skylarking (as it was initially a b-side) because he felt he could not do the…

Steve Perry is such a challenge, because I know the guy can sing, as he did have that Sam Cooke thing going in his voice, but Journey's material was so bombastic and devoid of anything touching on authentic feeling (with a few exceptions) that the good qualities in his voice were overwhelmed by strident, over-the-top…