ALBUM REVIEW

Many art rockers have symphonic pretensions, but it takes gumption to compose a “symphony.” Enter Muse: The British trio’s fifth album closes with “Exogenesis: Symphony,” a three-part suite full of grandiose orchestral swells and lyrical koans like “Why are we? Who are we?” Muse’s humongous cresting and tumbling songs have earned them a massive cult following, along with criticism that the band sounds a little too much like its heroes. (Frontman Matthew Bellamy has a serious Thom Yorke fixation.) Songs like the industrial-flavored “Uprising” prove again that Muse know how to whip up an almighty roar. But the lyrics are pompous doggerel (”Coercive notions re-evolve/A universe is trapped inside a tear”), and they borrow shamelessly from Radiohead and Queen without the former’s musical invention or the latter’s cheeky swagger.

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As you probably know by now, the remastering of the Beatles catalog was carried out with the caution of translating the Dead Sea Scrolls. Happily, the results justify the obsessive care. These 14 stereo remasters — from Please Please Me (1963) to Let It Be (1970), with a two-disc Past Masters added for good measure — make the original recordings sound newly invigorated and alive, whether you’re listening on standard earbuds or a high-end system.

An enormous effort was made to stay true to the original mixes, so there aren’t going to be any easy revelations for Beatles fans. Instead, these albums sound deeper, richer and fleshed-out.

To read the complete review visit ROLLINGSTONE.COM

The idea is inspired: gather an intimate audience of your biggest fans and put them in Levon Helm’s Woodstock, New York, barn to watch you record your new material. That’s what the Black Crowes did for their latest album — an 11-song set of ragged rockers and funky jams (Before the Frost …) plus an extra nine-song collection of mostly acoustic, country-tinged tunes (Until the Freeze …) that you can download after purchasing the physical disc.

You get a little sick of hearing the crowd between songs (we get it, there’s an audience!), but in many ways this is the album the Crowes have been meaning to record for years. After ratcheting up a cool swagger with the grungy guitars and ragtime-y piano of “Good Morning Captain,” the band delivers rock-solid country-rock balladry (”Appaloosa”) and chunky, Faces-style rock & roll (”A Train Still Makes a Lonely Sound”).

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Stryper first broke on to the music scene with their debut EP, Yellow and Black Attack in 1984, since that time they’ve sold more than 8 million records. I can remember the buzz that it generated when the band’s music videos first started getting aired on MTV.

The band’s latest release, Murder By Pride, is a collection of songs that go back to the band’s original sound. Michael Sweet has been quoted as saying that, “after years of speaking to fans and hearing comments like ‘more guitars,’ ‘more solos’ and ‘more screams,’ I decided to keep those suggestions in mind as I wrote each song.

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Hayley Williams didn’t spend her adolescence stalking the halls of a New England prep school. And her Christian faith probably precludes her from using the word goddamn like an indefinite article. But the flame-haired Paramore frontwoman is, without question, rock’s Holden Caulfield: There’s no limit to Williams’ disgust with phoniness in all its forms.

After building a devoted fan base through tours with the B-list emo likes of Bayside and Cute Is What We Aim For, her young suburban Nashville quintet busted out in a major way with 2007’s Riot!, a powerful little smart bomb of righteous-babe rhetoric that earned Paramore a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist alongside Taylor Swift and Amy Winehouse.

In “Misery Business,” the album’s crossover hit, Williams described a routine instance of alpha-chick warfare with the laser-guided insight of a tattooed Tina Fey. Her reward? Platinum sales and a worldwide army of Manic Panic’d lookalikes.

To read complete review visit  SPIN

Conventional wisdom marks 2006’s Pearl Jam as the grunge outfit’s reignition point after years without a spark. If that’s true, then the first three songs on their ninth full-length are the explosion at the end of an extremely long fuse. The band hasn’t put together a trifecta this energized and from-the-gut in a decade, and though the rest of  Backspacer doesn’t match that opening salvo, it has a terrific time trying.

“Gonna See My Friend,” “Got Some,” and “The Fixer” nearly upend each other rushing out the gate, exploiting Pearl Jam’s leanest, punkest tendencies. And those traits carry through the album’s 36 minutes. No time to waste and Obama in the White House mean no political bellyaching, so when Eddie Vedder pulls out that indignant yet inclusive snarl and proclaims, “When something’s gone, I wanna fight to get it back again,” you can probably assume “it” is his band’s mojo.

To read complete review visit SPIN