Michael Gallucci has written about music, movies and other pop culture happenings for Diffuser.fm, Ultimate Classic Rock, PopCrush, Village Voice Media, the AV Club, Cleveland Scene, Baltimore City Paper, Detroit Metro Times, Paste, Spin, San Antonio Current, American Songwriter, Goldmine, All Music Guide, the Plain Dealer and Illinois Entertainer, among other publications and websites, for a long, long time. He lives in Cleveland.
No one really talks about the Wallflowers’ first album. And when they do talk about it, they talk about how Jakob Dylan could never be as good as his dad, so why does he even bother trying? The group’s self-titled 1992 debut is filled with songs that ripped on and ripped up Dylan Sr., as Junior attempted to build his own rep his own way. But things didn’t turn out like he planned. Because all people talked about was how Jakob Dylan could never be as good as his dad.
Soundgarden finally hit on something with 1994’s ‘Superunknown.’ It helped that the rest of the nation finally caught up with their sludgy mix of Seattle punk and Sabbath-inspired doom metal. But after three albums of increasingly heavy and thundering sounds, Soundgarden reached No. 1 with a record that threw an artsy expansion pack in there. So when they followed up ‘Superunknown’ two years later with ‘Down on the Up Side,’ it was only in the natural order of things that would lead them to continue on this experimental path.
The National pretty much summed up their aesthetic 10 years ago with the title of their second album, ‘Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers.’ No other blog-blessed indie band of the 21st century captures despair, melancholy and gloom in song quite like the Brooklyn-based quintet. Much of the gloom can be credited to singer Matt Berninger, whose grim baritone infuses the National’s songs with apocalyptic dread. Every heartbreak sounds like the literal end of the world when it comes from his lips.
It seems like the cleaning crews just got done clearing the grounds of Coachella 2013's trash, and already organizers are looking forward to next year's festival. They just announced that Coachella 2014 will once again take place over two weekends: April 11-13, 2014, and April 18-20, 2014.
In many ways, Foo Fighters’ second album, ‘The Colour and the Shape,’ is really their first. Or at least their first as a real band. Dave Grohl made the group’s 1995 self-titled debut as a solo project -- basically demos recorded by himself in a Seattle studio with a producer in less than a week. Grohl played all of the instruments (except for one guitar part) and dug up a handful of old songs he had written when he was in Nirvana. The new songs he wrote tried to come to terms with Kurt Cobain’s death. Foo Fighters weren’t supposed to be the next chapter in Grohl’s career, but they turned out that way.
Indie rock was in a state of flux as it approached the end of the 20th century. The guitar-based noise that helped shape the music in the early part of the '90s was disappearing by 1998. Only the warmed-over leftovers and copycats were still around by this point
Would you believe this relatively normal looking high-school kid would grow up to be a rock star who scared the living crap out of some people? Of course, he wasn't exactly sporting lightly tousled hair and a striped button-down shirt during his controversy-courting performances.
Here’s the thing about the Ramones’ ninth album, ‘Animal Boy,’ which was released in 1986: Even though it falls in the middle of the group’s dismal period that continued until their end, it includes one of their very best songs. Like, ever. The band was on a downward spiral in the mid-‘80s, as they rushed to keep up with music fans’ fickle and changing tastes. Many of the people who gravitated toward the Ramones in the ‘70s because of their two-chord, two-minute assaults were beginning to realize that way too many of the band’s songs sounded the same.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been making music since 1983. But it took another eight years until people started to pay attention. Thanks to a new record company, a bigger budget, a producer who knew what to do with them and more focused songwriting, 'Blood Sugar Sex Magik,' their fifth album, made them stars. They started making better videos around that time too. The
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