New Music Releases - Week of May 3rd
Godsmack - The Oracle (Deluxe Edition): The Oracle is another lyrical and musical touchstone for the Boston foresome. The new album revels in Godsmack’s scorching underpinnings, served up via frontman Sully Erna’s monster-vocals on the scathing new single, “Cryin’ Like A Bitch,” and other songs, including “Saints And Sinners,” “War And Peace,” “Devil’s Swing,” and “Good Day To Die.” The Oracle is the band’s first studio album since 2006’s Godsmack IV, another platinum-plus trailblazer for the group, debuting at #1 on the Billboard Top albums chart (their 2nd #1 debut following 2003’s Faceless) and harking back to the signature sound of multiplatinum masterpieces like their 5 million selling breakthrough debut album and 2000’s AwakeConsidered one of the definitive alternative hard rock bands in contemporary music.
The Flaming Lips And Stardeath And White Dwarfs With Henry Rollins And Peaches Doing Dark Side Of The Moon: The world’s most predictably unpredictable band, The Flaming Lips, have teamed up with their Oklahoma City brethren, Stardeath And White Dwarfs to record their own unique take of Pink Floyd’s 1973 classic album ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon,’ under the title of The Flaming Lips and Stardeath And White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins And Peaches.
The collaborative project was recorded after several weeks of both bands touring the world together and mutually citing Pink Floyd as one of their favorite bands of all time and ‘The Dark Side Of the Moon’ as one of their primary influences.
Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record: Trimmed down to only seven members, the Toronto-based collective churns out 14 new songs for their first album in five years. A few tracks slip by without anything too special, but the songs that work are some of the band’s best. Check out the album opener, “World Sick,”along with “All to All,” “Ungrateful Little Father,” and “Me and My Hand.”
The Hold Steady - Heaven Is Whenever: There’s an expansiveness, a sense of space to this album which The Hold Steady hasn’t ever allowed itself before. Several songs are familiarly “Hold Steadyish” with the loud, crunchy guitars fans are used to (“Hurricane J”, “Rock Problems”), but the two openers, “The Sweet Part of the City” and “Soft in the Center”, for instance are breezy, roomy rock numbers with Craig Finn sounding more at ease with himself than ever before. If their previous album, Stay Positive, is, as the band said, about aging with grace in a youth-oriented rock culture, Heaven Is Whenever sees The Hold Steady settling in as confident elder statesmen.
Share This Post!