Back when this album came out, me and John were planning on bringing back our Rokk Talk podcast to do a deep dive into The Strokes, one of our most formative bands. We never ended up doing it, possibly due to the general inertia that the pandemic has wrought on all of us or possibly due to the somewhat unexciting nature of this album. This isn’t to say that The New Abnormal is an all-out bad Strokes album — I’d still put it ahead of the letdown machine that was 2013’s Comedown Machine as well as 2006’s career-tanking First Impressions of Earth. Though after a seven-year gap, it would have been nice to see The Strokes come back in a big way, while The New Abnormal sees them coming back in more of a mixed-bag kind of way. Continue reading →

Well, we’re almost through another year, though I don’t think anyone will be sad to see the miserable dumpster fire that was 2020 come to an end later this month. As is typical of most years, I’ll be taking a look at a grab bag of albums that I didn’t get around to reviewing on the blog. While I managed to keep a pretty good handle on reviewing my favorite albums (or at least mentioning them on podcasts or Quarantine Diaries), there were still a few that slipped through the cracks. But most importantly, we need these posts to make sure this year doesn’t feature our lowest post count ever (I got my eyes on you, 2018). 2020 brought us a lot of lows, but let’s try to prevent another one.

Talking about this album may feel a little redundant, since I did talk about Jeff Rosenstock earlier this year in my Top Ten Albums of the ’10s as well as a shout-out to his 2019 live album. However, I never actually talked about the album that he released in May, possibly because I wrote it off a bit at first. Fortunately, 2020 has been a year with plenty of opportunity to give things you didn’t pay too much attention to earlier a second look, because what the hell else did we have to do? So while No Dream initially struck me as a very solid Rosenstock album (if one that didn’t feature any huge steps forward), it has grown on me due to a great mixture of Rosenstock’s ability to be loud and energetic paired with a melodic craft often underseen in punk rock. Continue reading →

If there’s one good thing to come out of 2020 (other than the obvious one that happened a couple weeks ago), it’s that there’s been a lot of unexpected album releases. Some of these have been albums that were long in production (Run The Jewels’ RTJ4, Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters) and some of them have been surprisingly great albums that were recorded on a whim during quarantine (Taylor Swift’s Folklore, Fleet Foxes’ Shore). Either way, the surplus of albums from prominent artists in 2020 clearly seems to be born out of the fact that musicians are stuck at home with nothing better to do than record songs as well as a need to communicate with listeners. Now, I’m not sure that the world needed another Ariana Grande album in 2020 after she put out two of the better pop albums of the 2010s in the last two consecutive years, but it’s still another welcome surprise. Continue reading →

It’s hard to say why my first instinct last Thursday night, when the vote counts started to turn in Joe Biden’s favor, was to put on my headphones and go for a walk while listening to Bruce Springsteen. Though I have a few theories. For one, his latest album Letter To You had just been released, so The Boss has been at the forefront of my mind lately. Also, Bruce and Biden are both seasoned veterans of their trades from the tri-state area that have very storied and successful careers, and yet still somehow manage to retain their working-class roots. But most of all, Bruce is just one of those artists that brings me some level of comfort in times of uncertainty. Yet most of his songs, no matter how anthemic, always seem to have a level of overcoming darkness, which has not only been on the edge of town the past 4 years, but has threatened to swallow it up completely. Continue reading →