Country reviews, 2006-’11

Gary Allan, Set You Free Gary Allan has long been one of country’s most velvet-voiced beautiful losers. But on Set Me Free he lets the crazy out, howling psychobilly graveyard threats in “Bones,” interrupting a recovery meeting church organ to blame mental ghosts in “It Ain’t The Whiskey,” vegetating in his hotel room while college…

The Offspring profile, 1995

I dunno, maybe I gave the subjects of my only Spin cover story ever short shrift in my top 150 albums of 1994/’95 list. The singles on Smash are swell. But beyond that, I just get irritated. Maybe I’ll be able to hear pop-punk again after another decade or two, when I’m in my 70s…

Everclear review, 1997

One of my few section-fronting (and therefore longer) lead reviews in Spin. For some reason I don’t get, Generation Xers (or youngers) who write about music do not seem to remember Art Alexakis all that fondly. Perhaps they just weren’t old enough for him at the time. Spin, November 1997

Bad Brains profile, 1987

Frank Kogan had a field day way back when with my delusion that anger is an emotion that needs to be “earned,” whatever that could conceivably mean. (I blame my guilt-ridden Catholic upbringing.) Also, had I been aware at the time, it would’ve made sense to inquire about Bad Brains’ now well-documented history of homophobia,…

The Donnas review, 1998

Flipping the jailbait groupie script that had defiled hard rock since it came to be, the Donnas had their concept down from the start. All they needed to do from here was master more and more Ratt and Crüe chords, to kickstart the use-’em-up-and-toss-’em-out’s heart. Spin, March 1988

Moxy Früvous and Junkouse review, 1994

Cheap jokes stereotyping Canadians — for related silliness, see here. And in the long run, Great White Northerner or no, Moxy Früvous drummer/singer Jian Ghomeshi turned out to be not so polite. I was probably too hard on protest lyrics back then — were we really being overrun by songs about Pat Buchanan?? But I…

Colourhaus review, 1992

“Forget foxcore,” this starts out. And guess what? I did forget foxcore. I forgot such a thing ever existed, I forget what it was, and I never found out what the fox says…Foxette? Foxygen? Oh fox it, here’s Wikipedia: “Foxcore is a 1990s rock music genre of bands featuring female singers. According to Joanne Gottlieb and…

Lollapalooza review, 1996

Not sure how much it comes across, but I hate rock festivals. The idea of a magazine flying me halfway across the country to spend all day in a sweltering field of mud is a pretty decent approximation of Hell. But somehow, I don’t remember this one filling me with dread. Being a quarter century…

Sonic Taxonomy: ’90s Eurocheese

Social networks and global economics of scale have since flattened the world –- Europe’s pop turned more soul-conscious, America’s more synth-conscious, and most everybody’s wound up occupying watered-down middle ground. But back in the ‘90s, before MySpace and iTunes (or Friendster and Napster even), continental Europe was free to be a happily clueless bubblegum island…

Sonic Taxonomy: Oz Rock

As connoisseurs of marsupials and platypi have always known, evolution in Australia happens in a parallel manner to elsewhere — but sort of upside down, occasionally even laying eggs. So an American trying to sum up Australian rock history in just eight albums is probably about as foolhardy as if, well, an Aussie tried to…