You might not think you’ve heard of French band Phoenix, but I bet you have. There is a commercial currently on air produced by automobile staple Cadillac, and a Phoenix song from this very album is featured prominently in the advertisement, so much that the person driving the Caddy in the commercial is listening to Phoenix on their iPod in the car. But other than that, I would be surprised if this band had slipped through the more mainstream music cracks.
However, after listening to this 2009 album (as well as 2006’s It’s Never Been Like That) I can safely proclaim that as an outright tragedy, as this French quartet produces some of the catchiest, funnest, most upbeat Pop music in the World today. Continue reading
Describing Los Angeles based Silversun Pickups is a maddening task. They have a number of ingredients that sound quite familiar, but they also have a number of ingredients that are quite unique. On the surface, they’re an Alternative band that seems to pull quite a bit of their sound from The Smashing Pumpkins, but they also have elements that resemble Sonic Youth, and to some degree, a less theatrical Coheed and Cambria.
In 2006, I discovered a band based out of Stillwater, Oklahoma called Kunek. Their music was a delicate balance of hopeful and depressing, uplifting and melancholy. I listened the Hell out of their album “Flight of the Flynns”, and found that the uniqueness of the sound the band created was unlike anything I’d heard before. Years later, I hadn’t heard anything from the band, so I did a quick Google search and found out they changed their band’s name to Other Lives. They added some other elements to the core of Kunek, and that warranted a change in name. But, the question is, did the music suffer?