After Radiohead stubbornly refused to accept the mantle of "world's biggest and most important rock band" by releasing the willfully strange rocktronica fusion Kid A in 2000, Coldplay stepped up to the plate with their debut, Parachutes. Tasteful, earnest, introspective, anthemic, and grounded in guitars, the British quartet was everything ...
After touring in support of their debut album, Parachutes, Coldplay was personally and professionally exhausted. Frontman Chris Martin insisted he was dry; by the time they closed their European tour in summer 2001, he hadn't written a song in months. The U.K. music press immediately pounced on the idea of Coldplay calling it quits, but somewhere ...
The London foursome Coldplay were early critics' darlings in their native U.K., showcasing melodic pop on a slew of EP releases and constant live shows just after the spark of the new millennium. Not as heavy as Radiohead or snobbish as Oasis, Coldplay were revealed on Parachutes as a band of young musicians still honing their sweet harmonies. ...
Unlike the recent Classic Yo-Yo, really a single-disc sampler of the recorded work of our true superstar cellist, The Essential Yo-Yo Ma purports to be something more -- the Yo-Yo Ma album to own if you're going to own just one. Where Classic Yo-Yo more or less alternated track by track between Ma's straight classical and crossover music, The ...
This CD was recorded for a worthwhile cause (Special Olympics) and contains some great songs, most notably Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' "Christmas All Over Again" -- this is jingle-jangle pop at its best. Boyz II Men wrap their a cappella voices around "The Birth of Christ," and the two Wall of Sound standouts, Darlene Love and Ronnie Spector, ...
Two Rooms is a wildly uneven star-studded tribute to a wildly uneven superstar songwriting team. Though Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote many of the best pop songs of the '70s and '80s, they have written more than their fair share of clunkers as well. Some of them were chosen for this collection. Tina Turner, for example, tackles the ludicrously ...
From the opener, "Runaway," which rode to glory on Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band-mate Roy Bittan's distinctive keyboard riff, to the sweaty arena rock of "Get Ready," which closes the album, Bon Jovi's debut is an often-overlooked minor gem from the heyday of hair metal. The songs may be simple and the writing prone to all the clichés of the ...
Have a Nice Day, Bon Jovi's ninth studio album of original material, picks up where 2002's Bounce left off, showcasing a harder, heavier band than either 2000's Crush or Jon Bon Jovi's 1997 solo effort, Destination Anywhere. Not only that, but this 2005 album finds Jon Bon Jovi picking up on the serious undercurrent of Bounce, writing a series of ...
Bon Jovi had perfected a formula for hard pop/rock by the time of New Jersey, concentrating on singalong choruses sung over and over again, frequently by a rough, extensively overdubbed chorus, producing an effect not unlike what these songs sounded like in the arenas and stadiums where they were most often heard. The lyrics had that typical pop ...
In 2002, alternative CCM rockers Switchfoot cribbed some wider exposure from Mandy Moore, contributing tracks to her film Walk to Remember. It was a good fit, as the film, like the Foot, strode toward the mainstream without forgetting its good-hearted ideals. They returned in February 2003 with the slick modern rock missive The Beautiful Letdown, ...
At the beginning of the '90s, "metal" was a dirty word. A few bands, such as Metallica, had enough weight to appear as heirs to the metallic crown, but for the most part, it was the province of lightweight pop-metal mavens. How times change. By the end of the decade, metal was ultra-serious, with the typical band tackling somber, even morose, ...
Bon Jovi's four-CD/one-DVD box set of rarities, 100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can't Be Wrong, inspires two immediate reactions. The first: How in the world did Bon Jovi have four discs' worth of unreleased material in their vaults? The second: Who on earth would want to hear 50 rarities from Bon Jovi? To anybody who's not a devoted fan, the New Jersey ...
Deep Purple's definitive Mark II lineup reunited for 1984's Perfect Strangers. It is one of the better examples of a reunion album, although the band's uneasy camaraderie only lasted a few more years. "Knocking at Your Back Door" opens the album with a roar. Ian Gillan's lyrics don't make much sense, but Ritchie Blackmore's guitar riffs and Ian ...
Led Zeppelin's fourth album, Black Sabbath's Paranoid, and Deep Purple's Machine Head have stood the test of time as the Holy Trinity of English hard rock and heavy metal, serving as the fundamental blueprints followed by virtually every heavy rock & roll band since the early '70s. And, though it is probably the least celebrated of the three, ...
The four-years-in-the-making follow-up to Yes' comeback album, 90125, Big Generator was also a million-selling hit, although not as successful as its predecessor, probably because the singles "Love Will Find a Way" (number 30) and "Rhythm of Love" (number 40) couldn't match "Owner of a Lonely Heart" from the previous LP, even if they were ...
God knows why Bon Jovi felt the need to recut its best songs in an adult alternative style with Patrick Leonard as the producer. In the thorough liner notes -- presented as an interview between Jon Bon Jovi and guitarist Richie Sambora -- by the suddenly ubiquitous David Wild, Jon claims that the roots of the album derive from a Japanese show he ...
CBS (now Sony) Special Products' second discount-priced Blue Öyster Cult compilation improves upon its first, (Don't Fear) the Reaper, by including not only that album's title track, which was BÖC's biggest hit, but also "Burnin' for You," and its only other Top 40 entry. The other six tracks are good choices from the catalog, among them ...
Serious country fans know that "Lost Highway" is a Leon Payne-written Hank Williams classic, but even though Bon Jovi's 2007 album shamelessly trades on iconographic country imagery in a bid for a genre-skipping crossover hit, it's designed for those country fans who don't much care about Hank's legend (never mind knowing anything about Leon Payne ...
With no desire to ease fans into the explosive terrain of II, Billy Talent immediately detonate the ominous "Devil in a Midnight Mass" with an electrified energy that most bands need cases of Red Bull (or actual electrocution) to pull off convincingly. Presided over by the furiously snotty vocal cords of Ben Kowalewicz -- who can yelp, sing, and ...
With multi-genre crossovers currently all the rage in the rock and alternative scenes, critics are left to fumble desperately about for labels. Fair to Midland make it tougher than most: neo-prog or prog-core anyone? In any event, after two self-released albums, the Texan cult heroes renowned for their explosive live shows signed to the Serjical ...
EMI's The Most Famous Opera Duets is a decent collection of excerpts that delivers on enough of its promise to be forgiven its superlative title. A few notable blockbusters are missing, like "O soave fanciulla" from La bohème and the evening prayer from Hansel and Gretel, but overall the collection covers its territory well -- from the famous ...
A strange thing happens before the two-minute mark in "Saeglopur." All the twinkling and cooing erupts, at what might seem like eight minutes earlier than normal, into a cathartic blast of tautly constructed group noise -- or, as those who prefer songs and motion over moods and atmospheres might say, "The good part comes." "Saeglopur" is ...
This is an "authorized" greatest hits collection in the sense that the band picked the selections themselves. It's preferable to the 1991 Greatest Hits comp for its slightly greater length (16 songs) and better choice of material; the single version of "Southern Girls" makes it on this time around, for instance. Still, like that other album with ...
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