RockReviews Music Blog

Age doesn’t necessarily denote musical prowess, but for My American Heart, a band who wrote their debut when most of the members were merely 16, making great music has only been augmented by three years of touring, practice and acquired knowledge. The San Diego fivesome’s dynamic, innovative second record reverberates with a sense of newfound wisdom and the sort of skill that comes only from that hard-earned experience, a reminder of how shockingly young the makers of the record actually are. The strikingly varied disc, metaphorically entitled Hiding Inside the Horrible Weather to denote the beauty that inherently lies in all things, soars from hooky, driving rock (“The Shake (Awful Feeling)” and “Boys! Grab Your Guns”) to introspective acoustic ballad (“Tired and Uninspired”) to expansive searches that reveal a whole new side of My American Heart (“Dangerous” and “Fantasy”). Soliman’s lyrics are noticeably more refined, spinning with clever turns of phrase and poetically-inclined verses- yet another gleaming facet of evident growth on the record.

(One) musician, upon seeing the innumerable loops and samples strewn about the studio, inadvertently inspired the band’s name when he said, ‘This looks like garbage.’ Replied Vig, ‘Exactly. And we’re going to turn this garbage into a song.’
--Garbage Bio, 1995

Four albums and seven Grammy® nominations later, Garbage has its first “best of” collection--the CD and DVD collections, Absolute Garbage (Almo Sounds/Geffen/UMe), released July 24, 2007. Along with the new track “Tell Me Where It Hurts,” Absolute Garbage features 17 songs of extreme and intense emotion, from “Stupid Girl,” “Queer” and “#1 Crush” to “Special,” “Bleed Like Me” and “Why Do You Love Me.”

Chris Cornell has made quite a noteworthy career in rock with groups such as Soundgarden, Audioslave and Temple of the Dog, yet he still manages to surprise the listeners on his latest solo effort "Carry On". While I was expecting to hear a lot of tracks in the vein of Audioslave, it turned out this album relies on mellow material for the most part. Carry On is rather mature release in terms of music, which ranges from soulful blues to pop, rock and even country.

A thought that strikes one's mind immediately while listening to the new pop/rock act Night Kills the Day for the first time, is the unique yet somewhat cold sounding voice of the vocalist Luke Brian. The music itself is somewhere between The Cure, Joy Division, Bauhaus and U2. Notably this New York based four-piece recorded this debut theirs under Joe Blaney's (Ramones, Keith Richards, Clash among others) guidance.