fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Songs & Stories 