A Review of "Angles," by The Strokes

Posted in Record Reviews, The Strokes on March 17th, 2011 by Willie

I was an 18 year old senior in high school when The Strokes burst onto the scene in the fall of 2001.  I immediately liked them, for all the cliched reasons.  I loved their style.  5 skinny guys in cool vintage clothes wearing converse.  When you’re 18 years old in 2001, you pay attention to the trends on MTV, and for what seemed like the previous formative ten years of my childhood, every musician on TV was either a snotty group of California skater punks, a slicked back collection of glittering boy band douches, or macho jewel encrusted rappers.  Even all the nerdier groups were obnoxious and “in your face.”  No one was standing up for something truly cool, that is, until the likes of The Strokes and The White Stripes came along.  At last, here were young people who understood what made rock and roll fun, and who were not massive sell outs in any obvious away.  But of course, overnight, a massive backlash was unleashed.  The Strokes became objects of ridicule and scorn.  And it was easy to see why.  Here’s a list of the top 3…

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Radiohead, The King of Limbs Review

Posted in Radiohead, Record Reviews on February 19th, 2011 by Willie

I’ve always had a really dumb love/hate relationship with Radiohead.  When I was 16, I heard OK Computer for the first time, and my teenage mind was utterly blown.  That was sometime in 2000.  After I heard that record, I declared Radiohead my second favorite band of all time, and seriously thought they might challenge the Beatles for supremacy as my favorite rock and roll monolith.  Of course, I was a very impressionable 16 year old, and hadn’t extensively heard that much rock and roll besides the Beatles.  As time shuffled forward, Radiohead had fallen WAY down the list of  bands I love, to the point where the idea of hearing from them really kind of annoyed me.  The dumb aspect of me hating them all started when I was 18 or 19, when I went with my friend Ian to lovely Camden NJ (Murder Capital of the US) to see Radiohead play live.  Somehow we got duped into buying counterfeit tickets, got thrown out at the gate by a ticket agent who just laughed in our faces, and cops who treated us like we just stabbed somebody.  So, there we were, waiting for HOURS by a dangerous pier outside the arena, because we had a friend who got into the concert, who needed a ride home.  I was scared.  There was a crazy homeless man who wouldn’t leave us alone unless we bought weed off him, and I just gave him the 6 bucks left in my wallet to leave us alone.  Ian wanted to sneak into the show somehow, but we had chatted up a naval officer of some kind who was also doubling as a lookout for the cops, and I was paranoid he would call us in if we tried something crazy like that.  Needless to say, after that night, I kind of hated cops, New Jersey, big concerts, and by extension, Radiohead.  Read more »

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