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...

In looking back over my posts, I realized that I've never really dived into what my favorites of everything are. Yes, it's fairly easy to see from my reviews where my tastes in film, TV, and music lie, but I wanted to talk specifically about my favorites of pretty much everything. These lists outline my favorites from different genres of music and movies, as well as some more specialized lists. First up is a tough one: my top ten favorite albums of all time. This particular list is actually quite fluid, so there's no guarantee that I'll feel the same way in a month, much less in a year. That being said, at the time of this writing, these are my ten favorite albums in my library. 10. Revolver  - The Beatles (1964) The Beatles' first inclusion on this list is definitely not their last, but it made me fall in love with the Fab Four in high school. Revolver  was a transitional period for the band as they moved from their poppy origins towards a more psychedelic ...

I'm so elated to finally be writing this review. U2 is one of my favorite bands in the history of music. They are perhaps one of the most spiritual non-Christian bands in the industry and a very prolific live act as well. However, they've been very inactive with releasing new material since 2009's masterpiece (in this reviewer's opinion) No Line on the Horizon . It was last year that we heard "Ordinary Love," the first new material from the band in almost four and a half years. That song was for a film about the life of Nelson Mandela and won a Golden Globe. Their second single came as a promotion on the Super Bowl this year. "Invisible" was a free download on iTunes for two days during which Bank of America would donate $1 for every download. It was well-received as a promotional single; however, I really didn't want a whole album of that sound. It was a little too "radio-friendly," shall we say, for my tastes. And then today, ...