I suspect every review of Eminem’s new album, Recovery, will rightfully open with these words: Guess who’s back?
After three straight masterpieces and some excellent contributions to the soundtrack of his movie 8 Mile, Eminem tanked on Encore and Relapse. He’s far too talented for those albums to have been completely worthless, but they were a pale shadow of his previous accomplishments. Exhibit A that something was wrong: Not only did he think “Ass Like That” was worth recording, he thought it was a worthy single.
He knows he let us down: “Them last two albums didn’t count. Encore I was on drugs, Relapse I was flushing ‘em out.”
Clean, sober, and determined to get his groove back, Eminem gets so back to basics that Recovery is more stripped down than his major-label debut, The Slip Shady LP. Gone are the stupid skits (the bane of far too many rap albums) and even the traditional album closer first line, “A lot of people ask me…” Recovery is all music, no gimmicks.
And fine music it is. While Recovery doesn’t quite reach the heights of the holy trinity of The Slim Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP, and The Eminem Show, it comes damn close. The one bit of filler, the lame sex rap “Seduction,” is almost necessary to give the listener a chance to catch his breath before a furious second half that opens with an absolutely menacing cameo by Lil Wayne on “No Love” and never lets up for a second.
Along the way, Eminem notches what will probably be the single of the year, “Love the Way You Lie,” where an aching chorus from Rihanna (not content with only having 2007′s single of the year, apparently) anchors a wonderfully-strummed guitar bed for Marshall’s heartbroken rhymes. It’s a tremendous song, and it will seal his comeback the moment it hits radio.
Shady’s back. Tell a friend.
Eminem – “Not Afraid”
Eminem (with Rihanna) – “Love the Way You Lie”
Posted by Gordon Winslow 
The debut album of Florida band Surfer Blood absolutely rocks my shit. There, it’s been said. If you don’t wanna hang around for the rest of this review, that’s probably for the best, and unless you suffer from poor reading comprehension skills, that first sentence tells you that you should have immediately abandoned this review after reading said sentence, knocking over your crusty computer chair in a mad dash to grab your car keys and fly to your nearest record store to purchase Astro Coast. Barring that, if you are one of them digital-type persons, you should have at least furiously aggravated your carpal tunnel in the rush to download this album from your nearest legal purveyor of digital music. Seriously, are you still reading this? Go on, you can come back later to have your feelings validated about how kick ass of a record this is. Don’t worry, I’ll be here.
I’ve always told people that I wanted to start a band that mixed Bluegrass and Punk Rock. Most people looked at me like I was crazy, but now one band has made sense out of the idea.
New York-based band fun. have released their debut record, Aim and Ignite, and I am an unabashed fan (thanks, Kirsten, for the heads up!). Formed by Nate Ruess, previously the lead singer of The Format, fun. shares some of the unabashed pop sensibilities of that band. However, as opposed to the straight up guitar power pop of The Format, fun. takes things in an outlandish direction of magnified sugar and, well, fun. Pulling out all the stops, Ruess channels Freddie Mercury at almost every turn, and the arrangements of the songs at times veer from A Night at the Opera on speed to Caribbean-tinged bounce to sweet, symphonic strings liberally garnished with Sgt. Pepper-style horns. The most obvious comparison that will inevitably be made here is with 
hyperstory
Seattle band Throw Me the Statue are a difficult band to classify. Sure, there’s the catch-all “indie pop” label that could easily be applied, but that’s not the classification I am talking about. This band is a chameleon, and their latest effort, Creaturesque, is one hell of a shapeshifter of a record. Opening track “Waving At The Shore,” with its bouncy melody and horns, immediately recalls The Cure’s “Close To Me.” The shuffling psychedelia of “Tag” and the bouncy pop of “Dizzy From The Fall” are dead ringers for The Shins. “Ancestors” is a great (if slightly out of fashion) imitation of a Joy Division/Interpol song, with lead singer Scott Reitherman sounding eerily like Ian Curtis at points. Deliciously sugary guitar tune “Hi-Fi Goon” unabashedly copies the style of fellow northwesterners Built to Spill, throwing in a bit of Blur and Pavement for good measure. Before the album’s close, we also have what sound like dead-on imitations of Beck in his Mutations/Sea Change acoustic mode (“Baby, You’re Bored”) and Neil Young (“Shade For A Shadow”). These are all pretty impeccable influences to have, and it’s understandable when a band makes obvious reference to the groups that inspired them. However, Throw Me the Statue haven’t yet found a way to blend together the elements of their influences into a cohesive or defining sound of their own. The result is a collection of songs that sound like individual tributes to other bands rather than ones that build an identity for their creators.
Despite the strange post-60s obsession with musicians writing their own songs, the fact of the matter is that sometimes a song written by one artist is best interpreted by another.
Alex LaPointe
Jason Austinite
mattmck01
normalnorman
Gordon Winslow
