When We Were Seventeen

Arguably the greatest concert lineup I ever saw was a 2005 bill featuring Paramore and Cartel as the openers for The Receiving End of Sirens and Acceptance. 17 years later and it seems impossible that those bands could have possibly toured together, given the way that each of their legends has expanded in the years since. Each [...]
Now Stretch Out and Move On

My Alkaline Trio fandom peaked at the turn of the century and like presumably every Trio fanatic, I loved “Radio.” Spotify tells me that “Mercy Me” has more plays, but that seems like a quirk of streaming statistics and I refuse to believe that it’s a more popular track among the band’s fans; if you’re asked to think of [...]
I Don’t Wanna Die in June

“doomsday” opens with the specificity of poetry: “pull the plug in September / I don’t wanna die in June.” And like good poetry, McAlpine’s songwriting pulls the listener forward, both sonically and lyrically, with the promise of what’s to come, the hope that your questions will be answered. Why, for example, is McAlpine’s narrator flatlining? (Heartbreak, obviously!) And [...]
Though to You It Seems It Is Implausible

Atom and His Package is not for everyone. The long-since-defunct band—and we’re really stretching that word here—was the lo-fi synth-punk project of Philadelphia’s Adam Goren. Atom was Adam, of course, and the Package was his synthesizer, and that weird little explainer is the part that made sense. Atom loved (skewering) punk and so he, uh, [...]
Memory, Mend Me

I mean this as no disrespect to the long tenures, considerable talents, and sizable contributions of Nate Mendel and Chris Shiflett, but I have always thought of Foo Fighters as “Dave Grohl’s band with Taylor Hawkins.” That perspective is not, strictly speaking, accurate, but it does seem to capture the spirit of the band. While Mendel [...]
So Don’t Expect Me to Understand

I once told a friend that, when it came to music, I didn’t have any guilty pleasures because I never feel guilty about listening to something that I enjoy. And that’s still true! But when my fortitude on that front is tested, it’s not by my deep and abiding love of all things Sara Bareilles or even by my [...]
What You Need, You Will Find

I don’t know how to explain Mobile Steam Unit to you because I don’t know what Mobile Steam Unit is. They’re a band, sure, and they released their first full-length album, Desk Jockeys, earlier this year. Past that, things get murky fast. See, Mobile Steam Unit is a band that writes songs about business, often enough [...]
What If I Fuck It Up Like I Always Do?

The French term terroir is vastly underutilized. The idea of terroir is that indirect factors like climate, soil, topography, and local flora can influence a wine’s flavor profile. It’s astonishing to me that a word like this—a word describing the phenomenon of external factors indirectly but materially impacting the development and end product of something extraneous—isn’t applied to essentially everything, all [...]
I Wanna Love Somebody but I Don’t Know How

“Sucker’s Prayer” is the classic rock song buried on the synth-fever-dream that is the Decemberists' I’ll Be Your Girl, and it hides an extremely clever bit of thematic harmony. When the chorus comes in, supported by a literal chorus, it subverts standard tropes of unrequited or failed love by describing a non-existent one: I wanna love [...]