An early summer night in 2008. Boy scoops girl up in battered Grand Am. A tentative, innocent kiss. “Where to,” he asks? “Let’s just drive. I finished your mix!” She smiles, handing him a slim disc case. There are graphics, a tracklisting, liner notes. My kinda girl, he thinks to himself. He scans the tracklist: Counting Crows, Deborah Cox, Motion City Soundtrack, Evanescence. He slips the disc into the player, willing to forgive the Evanescence in lieu of the sheer […]
Posts tagged "pop-punk"
Spin Cycle: The All-American Rejects’ “Kids in the Street”
It seems a bit unfair to lump Oklahoma power-poppers All-American Rejects in with the sort of Hot Topic rock that broke around the same time as the band did; sure, they’ve never been the most challenging of bands, and their candy-coated hooks generally make them feel like the musical equivalent of pop rocks, but if catchiness were a liability, The Beatles never would have commandeered rock and roll in the first place. The closest thing AAR have to a dyed-in-the-wool […]
Spin Cycle: Taking Back Sunday’s “Taking Back Sunday”
Whatever happened to emo bands? There was always something reasonably endearing about the best of them – whiny, sure, but so earnest and prone to literate ramblings that they seemed the perfect antidote for an indie scene that seemed to value ironic detachment much more than the nerdy kid’s lovelorn poetry, hastily scrawled onto tear-soaked notebook paper. Was it annoying after a while? It sure was, but you gotta admire these kids’ willingness to put aside rock-minded things like pride, […]
