9/6/11 - The Front Bottoms
‘The Front Bottoms’
“Despite all the darker tones this is actually a fun listen. You will be singing along to ‘Maps’ and ‘The Beers’ before you know it. The thing that holds the album together is Mathew Uychich’s frantic and ferocious drumming. Listen to ‘Flashlight’ or ‘Looking Like You Just Woke Up’... Matt’s anxious backing vocals, especially sung at the same time as Brian’s, could be the unconscious voice of the singer’s mind. Musically I am reminded of the Violent Femmes, another band with fun songs but with a sinister twist (on the excellent ‘Father’ the singer imagines beating his dad with a baseball bat and tries to find comfort with his girlfriend). On Legit Tattoo Gun, Sella sings ‘My head has thoughts/ What a ridiculous place to start.’ Keep those thoughts coming.” - Ed Magdziak, You Don’t Know Jersey ‘11
9/17/90 - Cocteau Twins ‘Heaven or Las Vegas’
“Heaven or Las Vegas explodes in Technicolor from the first melty guitar chords on ‘Cherry-Coloured Funk’. Every note sounds like a new and richer shade of indigo and scarlet and violet than the previous one, and it doesn’t fade until closer ‘Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires’ descends into silence...Heaven is supersaturated: lush without being vulgar, luxuriant without being indulgent... We may not always be able to understand [Elizabeth Fraser’s] lyrics, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. In fact, her lyrics would never be more vital or confessional than they are on Heaven, which lends the music added emotional and conceptual heft... What’s particularly remarkable about the album is how compact it is: All but two of these 10 tracks clock in around three-and-a-half minutes, and the whole thing is over and done with in a mere 38 minutes.” - Stephen M. Deusner, Pitchfork ‘14
9/21/93 - Nirvana ‘In Utero’
“[Kurt] Cobain essentially works according to one playbook, but it’s a winner no matter how he runs it. His songs invariably open with a slow-boil verse, usually sung in a plaintive groan over muted strumming and a tempered backbeat. Then Cobain vaporizes you with a chorus of immense power-chord static and primal howling... The icy tension of the part ballad, part punk-rock blues ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ ...confirm that if Generation Hex is ever going to have its own Lennon — someone who genuinely believes in rock & roll salvation but doesn’t confuse mere catharsis with true deliverance — Cobain is damn near it.” - David Fricke, Rolling Stone ‘93
9/27/05 - Panic! At The Disco -‘A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out’
A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out divided music critics at the time of its release. Billboard, ten years after its release, deemed it ‘one of the most polarizing albums of our time.’ Cory D. Byrom of Pitchfork was perhaps the most negative, criticizing the state of contemporary emo and bemoaning the album’s apparent lack of ‘sincerity, creativity, or originality’...Rolling Stone listed it among the ‘40 Greatest Emo Albums of All Time’ in 2016, with James Montgomery dubbing it a ‘genre-defying blueprint’ and commenting ‘it’s difficult to argue that it’s not a snapshot of where “emo” was at in 2005, right down to the sentence-long song titles.’” - Wikipedia
9/2/13 - The 1975 ‘The 1975’
“On its surface, the 1975’s self-titled album is a synthy pop-rock album about sex and drugs and girls. It’s an album about loving those things and being equally depressed by them. If you’re sympathetic to it, The 1975 is danceable and full of aspirationally messy vignettes that paint a portrait of a singer who is equal parts cool and tragic. If you’re not, it’s a bloated album full of unimaginative reference points genetically engineered to garner teenage fans written by a man with TV stars for parents and his three friends from school. I think, in truth, it is all of that at once.” - Miranda Reinert, STEREOGUM ‘23
9/4/01 - System of A Down ‘Toxicity’
“Raised in Los Angeles’s Armenian-American community, all four members of System of a Down were primed to see through the myth of American exceptionalism that would justify the coming warmongering of George W. Bush’s presidency. Their families had survived the Armenian genocide under the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century; they grew up in the United States with ancestral scars from a massacre still officially denied by its perpetrators, which lent them keen eyes for political suppression and internal propaganda. It’s as if their position as ethnic outsiders in one of the largest cities in the U.S. contributed to the atypical configuration of their sound.” - Sasha Geffen, Pitchfork ‘18
9/24/96 - Weezer ‘Pinkerton’
“[Rolling Stone critic Rob O’Connor wrote,] ‘Throughout Pinkerton, [Rivers Cuomo] pines for all the girls he can’t have, the girls he can have but shouldn’t, the girls who are no good for him and the girls about whom he just isn’t sure.’ Lukewarm reviews rolled in. Both the record and lead single...fizzled out from there. The poppiest track available, ‘The Good Life,’ peaked at 32, while ‘Pink Triangle,’ a tale of one boy’s unrequited love of a lesbian, failed to chart at all. Rolling Stone readers declared [it] the third worst album of the year. The record was dead in the water... In a plot twist fraught with irony, some longtime fans began lamenting the band’s latest efforts, begging for more Pinkerton and Blue Album–type material.” - Laura Marie Braun, Rolling Stone ‘16
9/29/09 - Paramore ‘Brand New Eyes’
“Brand New Eyes was my coming-of-age; I annotated each song with moments from my life, as if I had written them myself...[The track ‘Playing God’] staggers in with twinkling guitars...The drum and bass pace around like a conversation trying to sort itself out without any outbursts. It sheds civility when the chorus cuts in, uncompromising: ‘Next time you point a finger,’ Hayley Williams sings, ‘I’ll point you to the mirror.’ The song rolled its eyes at the men who tube-fed us doctrine, who claimed they held the answers to life’s purpose... [I grew fond of] ‘The Only Exception,’ a song I rejected when I first heard it because I thought it was a soft karaoke pick...The song’s narrator is ‘content with loneliness,’ but there’s something or someone that’s finally changing their mind, challenging them to take a risk and believe in love. ‘You are the only exception / And I’m on my way to believing,’ Williams murmurs at the end. Like a mantra I couldn’t utter, I wrote that line over and over.” - Alex Ramos, NPR ‘21