Artist: Agony Family
Album: Earth!
The Agony Family’s Earth! is an album of mainstream impulses. It’s pleasant, it’s easy to like (if you don’t recoil at synthesizers and glossy guitar in your pop music), but it’s a tough sell as something truly great, and as my favorite album of a strong musical year. I’ll make multiple awkward stabs at it. My first is to discuss a pop song I wish I could like more than I do, the […]
Artist: Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears
Album: Daffy’s Elixir
… But then there’s her reaction the first time she heard Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears: amused disbelief. “Are you listening to this on purpose?” {I was} “… It’s so cheesy! And ’70s!” Now, rather than sniping about an INXS fan calling anyone’s music “cheesy”, I will take the high road and concede her points. *If*, by cheesy, we mean that Bryan Scary albums are full of extravagant pop […]
The right music can be life-altering. Here are six artists whose music changed my life in some way…
Pat Benatar Crimes of Passion (1980)
Picture it. It’s 1981. I’m nine years old and there is still one older sister out of three living at home with me. My older sister is seventeen and has a stereo that plays vinyl. Every night, I hear her playing songs by Hall & Oates, Rose Royce, […]