The emotive guitar work that starts off “Arcadia” really does more to establish a voice for House on a Hill than any type of melodramatic, over the top type of warbling could do for a comparable emo band. The band seems to be influenced heavily by the mid to late nineties emo acts, taking cues from acts like Jets to Brazil and the Appleseed Cast. Nowhere on “Ladyslipper” does the…
Throughout the course of the last twenty-five or so years, Tim Allen has rapidly moved up from time as a stand-up comedian to a television and even to a silver screen star. It is thus not surprising that Allen’s next challenge would be as a director, so here we are with eir own, self-funded title Crazy on the Outside. In this film, Allen plays Tommy, an individual that was sent…
It seems as if Deadly Impact was a film that went under a great many radars when it was first released, but Fox / MGM has looked to rectify that with the release of the movie’s unrated version. In Deadly Impact, a set of hard-nosed individuals played by The Sopranos star Joe Pantoliano and Sean Patrick Flanery (from The Boondock Saints) strike out against one another. This is because Thomas…
House of Fools plays a weird brand of emo music, where soulful vocals in a dreamy vein blend with an electronic sound scape. This is the case with the shambling “Better Part of Me”. At some points, it sounds as if there are two different songs going; luckily, House of Fools are like Bright Eyes when it comes to tying disparate elements together, and that is why the act is…
I have been a Pet Shop Boys fan for about a decade now, and while I stick with a great many of their classic tracks, I feel that they have had a nice progression over the course of the last few years. “Pandemonium Live” is their latest effort, and it showcases the entirety of one of their storied live performances. This time out, the tapes were rolling at the O2…
Q:What’s your story? How’d you fall into music? My mom bought me a guitar with lessons for my birthday when The Beatles hit and I’ve been playing ever since. I started writing songs about a year later. I fell into music from the earliest time I can remember. I’ve been into music since birth. LOL
The first track on “Beta” is “Young And Reckless”, and this track shows that Hotspur is a band that blends together a newer rock approach with a slightly punky tempo to create something that is similar to acts like Three Days Grace. Along the way, Hotspur adds a little bit of the angular guitars (a la Franz Ferdinand and The strokes) that have been all the rage in rock, throwing…
Starting off “Last Train” with a rockabilly riff that would make Brian Setzer proud, Hotrod Boogie quickly gets tepid by riding this riff for an extended period of time, pushing their luck with over two minutes of what essentially is the same thing. The rockabilly stylings don’t end with “Hotrod Anthem”, but become ever more obvious during “Saturday Night Rock”. To be honest, the aforementioned tie to Brian Setzer is…
Alkaline Trio has pretty much guaranteed their spot of being a cornerstone band in the post-emo years, but it really seems as if rather than merely resting on the goodwill created by their prior works, AK3 are continuing to add to the diversity and complexities that mark their work as a band. The disc starts off with the titular track, a song that sets up listeners nicely for the entirety…
“Dix Dix” is a track that seems to recall the diverse, eclectic style of the early nineties; mixing parts of Jellyfish, Audioslave (The Chris Cornell-like vocals) and just a hint of the psychedelic movement, Hotpipes start out “The Deadly Poison” with a varied approach. Shifting their general sound considerably to reflect a new-found ska and reggae influence (while having a vocal arrangement similar to that of “Runaround”-era John Popper), the…
