My Own Little World

In 2004, a little band from Las Vegas called The Killers released their first album, Hot Fuss . It rocked the landscape of alternative music, with singles like "Mr. Brightside," "Somebody Told Me," and "All These Things That I've Done" still being played on alt rock stations to this day. That album very much feels like a complete collection of songs and not just like a few tracks slapped together into a record. The same can be said of that album's slightly lesser successor Sam's Town . As The Killers have continued their career, they have never really been able to replicate the coherence of their first two albums. For me, that's a really big deal: album flow is one of the things I look for the most in my music. Without a good flow, albums become haphazard and feel less polished to my ears and severely degrade in quality. Thankfully, guys, Wonderful Wonderful  is an album that feels like an album. The flow here is much, much smoother t...

Over the course of their career, Foo Fighters has been known for bringing a classic rock twist to the post-grunge genre. They are also very celebrated in the world of music, having won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Album over their past several consecutive albums. However, after their masterpiece of Wasting Light , released in 2011, I was wondering where they could go from there. Would they be more experimental or return to their roots? Sadly, the answer is neither. For the Foo Fighters, Sonic Highways  is definitely a journey to nowhere. Sonically, it loses a lot of the depth that Wasting Light  while not charting any new ground. It feels less intriguing, as if we've heard it all before. The guitar riffs tonally feel the same as before, which is definitely not a bad thing; however, they somehow are not nearly as enticing and demanding of our attention. Honestly, it feels as if Foo Fighters decided to move into a more conservative genre, as Wasting Light  was viscera...