Gin Blossoms
The Gin Blossoms were one of the more truly damned rock & roll bands to grace the pop charts in the early 1990s. The group was founded and spiritually led by singer-guitarist Doug Hopkins, who also wrote the band’s best songs; by the time New Miserable Experience, the band’s major-label debut, was released, Hopkins had been kicked out (his bandmates had apparently tired of dealing with his alcoholism). Shortly after the album’s release Hopkins killed himself, and the band subsequently enjoyed the biggest hit of its career with “‘Til I Hear It From You” (which, perversely, never appeared on a Gin Blossoms album, but only on the Empire Records soundtrack). The band dropped from sight not long after. New Miserable Experience remains the best and most representative document of the group’s existence, a tight and lean collection of brilliant, edgy pop music. “Hey Jealousy” and “Until I Fall Away” are the two songs that leave the deepest impression, but the crunchy melodicism and lyrical desperation of “Hold Me Down” sticks with you as well. Two dilettantish genre pieces — “Cajun Song” and a country weeper called “Cheatin’” (as in “you can’t call it cheatin’ ’cause she reminds me of you”) — provide the program’s two low points, but even those aren’t completely without charm. Review by Rick Anderson @ allmusic.com
Full Album Tracks Listing
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1. Lost Horizons
2. Hey Jealousy
3. Mrs. Rita
4. Until I Fall Away
5. Hold Me Down
6. Cajun Song
7. Hands Are Tied
8. Found Out About You
9. Allison Road
10. 29
11. Pieces Of The Night
12. Cheatin’
It’s easy to take potshots at actors turned musicians, since it often seems like the actors are taking advantage of their celebrity by turning into recording stars. This ignores two facts: first, often these actors have been playing music for as long as they’ve been acting; and second, who’s to say that these critics, if put in the same position, wouldn’t take advantage of their celebrity to pursue their dream projects? In the case of 30 Seconds to Mars, the metallic post-grunge quartet led by Jared Leto (after all these years, still best-known as Jordan Catalano on the alt rock-era TV series My So-Called Life, although he has been excellent in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream and David Fincher’s Fight Club and Panic Room, as well), these actor-turned-musician arguments don’t really matter since, by any measure, the band is quite awful. A melange of U2 atmospherics, grunge angst, gothic brooding, and metal guitars, the band floats out of time, inspired heavily by ’90s alt rock but too clean, heavy, and facile to truly be part of that tradition, yet too indebted to the past to sound like part of the 2000s, either. Their second album, 2005’s A Beautiful Lie — whose title is uncomfortably close to Nine Inch Nails’ “Terrible Lie” (and is most likely not borrowed from the Amazing Rhythm Aces’ 1975 song of the same name, either) — is a little tighter and more streamlined than their eponymous 2002 debut, but the basic angst-ridden rock remains the same. Leto isn’t a terrible singer — a little too breathy at times and a little too inclined to dive into a full-throated scream, but not terrible — and the bandmembers are capable enough at shifting from tense quiet verses to piledriving, heavy choruses, but they borrow the worst habits from all their favorite groups, and then assemble them in insufferably earnest fashion, playing clichés as if they were revelations. It’s a bleak yet hammy collection of self-absorbed gloom-rock, a record where an allusion to the title of the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” is treated as something soul-searching and profound (of course, it does hurt that A Beautiful Lie is being released just a month before “Just Like Heaven” is being borrowed for the title of a Reese Witherspoon romantic comedy). It’s clear that Leto and the rest of 30 Seconds to Mars really mean it, man — this is as earnest as an emo record gets. Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine @ allmusic.com
All through her career, it has been impossible to divorce Madonna’s music from her image, as they feed off each other to the point where it’s hard to tell which came first, the concept or the songs. Glancing at the aggressively ugly cover to Hard Candy — its blistering pinks and assaultive leather suggesting cheap bottom-barrel porno — it’s hard not to wish that this is the one time Madge broke from tradition, offering music that wasn’t quite as garish as her graphics. That is not the case. Hard Candy is all brutal hard edges and blaring primary colors, a relentlessly mercenary collection of cold beats and chilly innuendo. Sex has always been a driving force for Madonna, but she’s never been as ruthlessly pornographic as she is here, 
A few lines from a couple songs and some suggestive presentation guarantees that a significant amount of the reaction to Discipline, Janet’s tenth studio album, will feast upon the singer’s lack of judiciousness when it comes to expressing her sexuality. Leave the teasing and explicitness to the teens and younger twenty-somethings — not the grown women — right? Janet should get back to making sunny, uncomplicated songs like "Escapade" and pretend that the occasional-to-frequent salaciousness extending back to Control never existed. She should do that and, while she is at it, act her age. (When the three years younger R. Kelly releases his next album, no protests of a similar nature will be heard; ditto whenever the Rolling Stones perform "Brown Sugar.") While Discipline is dressed up like a racy affair with track-to-track titillation, it has only a couple moments where Janet