fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
When I stumbled across The Aces earlier this year, they felt like HAIM, if the HAIM sisters had spent less time listening to Wilson Phillips and more time listening to New Found Glory. Their songs are undeniably summery and their hooks are undeniably catchy. The short version: If you care about pop music, you should [...]
The Queue is a recurring excuse for me to talk about songs or albums in short form. This week I examine a catchy Head Automatica track, my slow-growing love for Canadian pop star Lights and a great finale from Michelle Branch. Let’s investigate. Head Automatica – "Laughing at You" Head Automatica's 2004 debut Decadence is, [...]
There's a little drive-in restaurant in Walled Lake that sits right on the water. I'll always remember it as an A&W but Google informs me that, in a change that I can hazily recall, it briefly shed its corporate parentage and became Tom's Root Beer Stand before closing its doors for good. Every year, after [...]
By the time Third Eye Blind released Ursa Major in 2009 it had been six years since the band's last album (2003's Out of the Vein) and nine years since the band's last substantial hit ("Never Let You Go"). The only people who cared about Ursa Major were the people who cared about Third Eye [...]
Every word of Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness is burned into my brain. So too are the album's subtle motifs and, no less, its more obvious ones. This is largely because, for a spell in the mid-2000s, progressive rock concept albums—with their overwrought titles, literary [...]
The Queue is a recurring excuse for me to talk about songs or albums in short form. I'm bending that formula a bit today to discuss The Peer Pleasure Podcast which I've been binging lately. Let’s investigate a few of my favorite episodes. Ep. 147 – Bobby Darling (Gatsbys American Dream) The first episode of [...]
Like a lot of you, I often turn to music for escape when I'm stressed. I'm less interested in the science of why we do this than I am in the choices we make of what to listen to. Broadly speaking, classical music should offer the most stress release but—even though there are a handful [...]
We're five months into a global pandemic and the world is (still) on fire. If you listen closely, above the raucous tumult of daily news briefings and abrasively selfish protestors, you can hear the soft whine of every single person on earth collectively screaming through clenched teeth. We all need a break. We all need [...]
Like every other card carrying millennial, I was disappointed when HAIM delayed their upcoming third album, the aptly titled Women in Music Pt. III, due to concerns arising from COVID-19. Is there nothing that this novel coronavirus cannot ruin? The pain of this delay is made all the greater by the album's absolutely killer first [...]
Until the COVID-19 pandemic altered the entire global landscape, I had planned to post this quick album review on March 19th but then this novel coronavirus began to take over my corner of the world and I had some strong opinions that needed venting. Needless to say, the concert discussed in this review has long [...]
