Always Grounded – Midnight Drive
Everything is fair in love, war and pop music of any variety. The latter, by far, includes some of the worst crimes. But you’re unlikely to hear about them when the pop star is out doing a promotional tour and trying to entertain the audience, watching them share anecdotes on television. To really get the nitty-gritty, you may just have to wait for a few decades for a tell-all book from the wives, husbands or assistants to come out.
But all of this shouldn’t be a surprise to you. After all, you are reading this review on a music website and must possess at least, some passing knowledge of the temperament of pop stars. The history of pop music is filled with stars stealing music ian from rival bands, changing musical styles, breaking dancers’ legs, and even making deals made with the devil.
Always Grounded has done anything as bad as travel to the crossroads on a rainy night in order to exchange a soul for stardom, but these musicians definitely could. “Midnight Drive” is such a hooky, modern pop-punk song that you’re bound to forget about all your problems for the time you spend hearing it. Punk has, in fact, never been this poppy and soft before. Will Always Grounded stop at nothing? Probably not, but you’ll be singing along nonetheless.
The Junior Varsity – Anxiety
Behind-the-scenes looks at your favourite band recording an album have always felt like a terrible idea for yours truly. Maybe you can pull off this kind of thing if the band you’re in plays jazz and wants to encourage others to learn some of the scales that you’re playing. But for everything else, particularly if it’s anything good, shouldn’t we protect the secrets?
We all know what goes on. People walk into a studio, try to be civil to one another, record instruments and have lunch. How predictable and unattractive! Meanwhile, some of the songs that they capture on tape could be about life, death, and the death spread out in between. Some of those songs could have the power to make you forget entirely, for their duration, about your problems as if some spell has been placed upon you. Do we really need to know what kind of sandwich they had on the breaks?
There’s something rather magical about The Junior Varsity’s “Anxiety.” It’s not because this is built on a modernised emo-rock engine. It’s not even because the guitar riff in the chorus works so well or because the singing fits the material and production. It’s because all of these things together manage to create a pretty marvellous illusion, a ticket into a grim spectacle that you get to walk out of immediately once the song ends. How can anyone deny that this is not something just slightly out of this world? Why would anyone want to know if these are regular folks or not?
