Joel Hartse

Matt Sharp left the band Weezer in 1997. Weezer has not made a great album since that time. A first-year psychology major knows correlation is not causation, but come on: Something happened. Surely when Sharp left, he took with him the je ne sais quoi that only a goofy, egotistical, falsetto-singing bassist can bring, no? […]

The standard line on Blur is that they were never able to crack America because they were just too English. They sing about super-British stuff that we just don’t get, like "bank holidays" and how things are "rubbish" and something called a "quango" (look it up). Blur’s one foray into the American rock scene, the […]

Rewriting the Bible is a pretty audacious undertaking. Jonathan Goldstein doesn’t seem like the most likely candidate for the challenge, either. He’s best known for the cringingly funny and self-deprecating stories he tells on radio programs like This American Life and Wiretap (the latter of which he hosts on CBC radio in Canada), stories about […]

The pop music machine thrives on timeliness, which is a shame. With the glut of new records that comes out every week, by the time the wheat has been separated from the chaff it’s far too late in blog-years to start a conversation. Still, some older albums demand ink, and the series of albums released […]

Kanye West has come a long way since The College Dropout, way back in the distant, innocent year of 2004, when he was idealistic and almost naïve (if a record full of raps about how awesome he is and how he deserves to be a best-selling rapper can be deemed naïve). 808s and Heartbreak would […]

t’s time to start taking Jenny Lewis seriously. Probably we should’ve started a long time ago — around 2002, when her band Rilo Kiley released The Execution of All Things (still, I think, their best album). But she was a former child actor. She did have The Wizard, Troop Beverly Hills and Foxfire to live […]

Ben Folds has let his imagination run away with him — an imagination he’s always had, but which has been reined in for most of his recording career. First it was kept in check by the three-person, three-instrument trio Ben Folds Five, which, even when it began to add string quartets and flugel horns, retained […]

Album by Weezer Geffen/Interscope The “clang clang clang clang” that began Weezer’s 1996 album Pinkertonheralded a masterpiece of tortured masculinity. They’ve never managed to release a record as complex, rewarding or fun since. And with the release of their latest self-titled album – this time known as the Red Album, if you’re keeping track – […]

Album by Mates of State Barsuk The last time Mates of State blew my mind was in 2003. This makes me feel old, and at first it makes me kind of disappointed that they haven’t done much blowing, mind-wise, since then. The brilliance of their first trio of records – My SoloProject,Our Constant Concern,and Team […]

Be Your Own Pet. Universal/Ecstatic Peace.   This just in: Record labels are stupid. In the case of Be Your Own Pet, Universal Records was doubly stupid in removing the three best songs tracks from BYOP’s sophomore album Get Awkward for dubious reasons, thereby encouraging people to download the original version of the album instead […]