"Is performing work that you had no hand in writing enough to make you an artist?"

"Illegitimate pop stars" = Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Patsy Cline, Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, the Ronettes, the Crystals, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones, pretty much every great pop act prior to 1964. Fucking poseurs, the lot of 'em.

So do the Ramones, AC/DC, and any post-rock band that's ever won an award. I get why people dislike Swift, but lack of variation's never been an utter dealbreaker in pop music.

Yeah, I love both bands and have seen them both play great shows a bunch of times, but when they toured together, Okkervil River played one of the best live sets I've ever seen. It was a pretty different lineup at the time, though. Travis Nelson was a blast to watch on drums, and Charles Bissell from the Wrens was…

Let's not confuse "kinda gross" with "immoral," Satellite. Peggy fucking Duck was the former, sure (which is sadly the norm for Peggy's sex life), but how is it the latter? She was single, he was divorced, no one got hurt.

Yeah, I should have clarified "the one studio album he played on up until that point". I came across this interview with Doe just a few weeks ago, and it explains a lot that Tony Berg had never really listened to X before producing Hey Zeus: http://www.markprindle.com/…. But, yeah, it's really not all THAT bad, and…

Some X fans get pretty down on the post-Billy Zoom era, but Gilkyson does some great stuff with Zoom's guitar parts on there. I particularly like the little touches he puts on "The New World."

Me, too. It's possibly bad enunciation or something, but I don't hear an "m" before that "anyways."

I'd be okay if all bands had the stomach to put out their longest, most expansive work as last-ditch efforts to cash in on fading relevance (although I don't think that's the case here, since it would have been practically as easy for Williams to have started anew as a solo artist). Paramore's not a perfect album and…

Cathartic Bullets - I read your comment as "my opinion is that this is one of the most anticipated records of the year" (meaning you think that many people anticipated it) rather than "this is one of the records I anticipate most this year," so apologies there.

You guys have gotta be kidding. No slam on Vile, who's fine, but to try to justify his album getting reviewed instead of Paramore's on the basis of "most anticipated of the year" is absurd. Maybe in some kind of hermetically sealed alt-bro universe is Kurt Vile's album a bigger deal than Paramore's* (or The Knife's or…

Yeah, the go-to comparison I used to explain their sound circa Riot! was "somewhere between Jimmy Eat World's self-titled and Kelly Clarkson in rock mode." It wasn't quite as apt for their last album (which was a little darker), or the new one (which is all over the place and a lot lighter on the big rock anthems),…

Yeah, this tune is considerably heavier than their other stuff, which is nice. Of course, that doesn't mean the rest of the album is going to be much of a departure. There were some tunes on their fifth that suggested a more upbeat vibe (like Jonsi's solo album turned out to have), but most of it was pretty…

More a response to the point you make below about mastering, but one of the main reasons I ended up buying a bunch of the Husker Du catalog on vinyl is because it never received a proper digital re-mastering. The old analog mix was just plopped on CD, so that's the digital version we have today. The CD and MP3 formats…

I have a 10 month old, and it's the same with me. I've probably danced more since she was born than I have in the previous 10 years combined.

It's all in 4/4, but it's pretty syncopated, and the the song is arranged in such a way that you might not notice that the accents don't change, even when the band gets to the "hey la"s. It's kind of like a very stiffly-played Latin rhythm (which I'd be more specific about if I knew anything about Latin beats). It's…

Never understood why some Replacements fans use Stinson's presence as some sort of absolute measure of quality. Sure, he was crucial on everything up to Let It Be, but he was much less important to the sound of Tim and wasn't on Pleased to Meet Me at all. Even if you knock Don't Tell a Soul as too glossy and count All…

I prefer Kaleidoscope Dream, too, but "underdeveloped" is selling Channel Orange short. It's heavier on texture and melodies that take some time to sink in than on traditional structures where the chorus is key (think "Bad Religion," which doesn't really groove at all and also doesn't lead up to so much as collapse…

I prefer Kaleidoscope Dream, too, but "underdeveloped" is selling Channel Orange short. It's heavier on texture and melodies that take some time to sink in than on traditional structures where the chorus is key (think "Bad Religion," which doesn't really groove at all and also doesn't lead up to so much as collapse…

Great scene, but I wouldn't say the movie cast has it all over the TV cast. Stacking them up character-by-character doesn't really make sense, since the tones are so different, but Krause, Potter, Christensen, and, probably most of all, Burkholder and Whitman generally turn in outstanding performances. Lauren Graham…