The Man From Another Place, The Loneliest Cowboy EP

By John Lane

There’s something a-brewing in Scotland, and aye, I believe it has the whiff of genius. (Macbeth, Scotland, witches reference—anyone? Bueller?)

The Man From Another Place (a.k.a. Dan Hirst) has proven himself to perhaps be the next incarnation of Burt Bacharach, providing five cinematic tunes on his debut EP that defy the listener to not daydream or soul-search. The title itself, The Loneliest Cowboy, hints at its instrumental-only air, suggesting a mute cowboy who wistfully ambles along with his ol’ horse and lets the music in his head do the talking while visualizing sweeping country vistas.
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The Dudes, Blood Guts Bruises Cuts

By Danny R. Phillips

In my younger years, Power Pop was a genre that I avoided it like the Black Plague or Herpes. As a long time advocate of the virtues of punk rock I could not allow myself to support music with such an identity crisis. Was it hard rock? Bubblegum? What? With a few exceptions, mainly Cheap Trick, The Cars, and the riff from “Jessie’s Girl,” it was not something I championed or even tolerated.

Then came the 1990s and with it came bands like Weezer and the exceptional songsmith Matthew Sweet, musicians who embraced the principles of power pop and drank fully of its long and storied past. Perhaps years had softened my barriers or I was now old enough to see that punk has its limits. Power Pop was no longer the enemy.
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Everybody Was In The French Resistance. . . Now!, Fixin’ The Charts Volume One

By Noreen Sobczyk

When I first heard that Dyan Valdes (The Blood Arm) and Eddie Argos (Art Brut) were recording an album together, I was excited.

Argos always has plenty of humor and clever turns of phrase in his musical arsenal to fight the musical blahs. His antics with faux glam band Glam Chops even made Christmas music more enjoyable. So when I read Fixin’ the Charts was an album of answer songs I thought, “Well, that’s clever.”
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I Found All The Parts, By Laura Faeth

By Less Lee Moore

In I Found All The Parts: Healing The Soul Through Rock ‘n’ Roll, we learn a lot about author Laura Faeth as we follow her on an important journey.
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Muse: Under Review DVD

By Christian Lipski

Muse: Under Review is a retrospective of the British rock band’s career since its start in Teignmouth, UK (and thank you for showing me how that is pronounced).

It’s an unauthorized biography, meaning the members of Muse did not contribute or endorse the material. Immediately, I’m assuming this means no music, no photos, and no new information, which was the main problem with earlier documentaries like Muse: Manic Depression.

Happily, I was well mistaken here. The DVD is filled to the brim with clips from videos and live performances, behind-the-scenes photos, and interviews with music journalists and key participants in the band’s rise. It’s two hours of in-depth study which should make the band’s fans glow with satisfaction.
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Lost & Never Found Again: Gyroscope

When I was very young, maybe three or four years old, my Grandmother worked at a grocery store, Best Way, in the small Louisiana town where we lived; she was the butcher, actually, but that’s another story.

The Best Way always had an impressive selection of comic books, Cracked, and Mad magazines that I’d read in the break room while visiting my Mam at work, and a pretty decent selection of cheesy toys: cap guns, puffy Batman stickers, jacks, and paddleballs and whatnot, but occasionally, they’d have something special.
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Lost & Never Found Again: Elmo The Comb

It is 1978. I am nine years old, a lonely, rootless kid riding in the back of a dilapidated Trailways bus rumbling across dusty Wyoming, and the whole of my life is a magical-realist, country-and-western version of David Copperfield. I’m talking about Dickens, though in retrospect I did seem pretty good at making people disappear.

Everything is television. It’s the only reliable thing. We go from town to town. I know nobody, and my inherent weirdness goes a long way towards keeping it that way. But when I turn on that TV, I know everybody, everything is funny or interesting or comforting. It doesn’t matter what town I’m in, or who I’m with: there is always Fred G. Sanford. As long as his heart can take it.
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Lost & Never Found Again: Badges And Plastic Babies

I had a pair of Sparks badges, Kimono My House-era, that I bought on Ebay when I first got into Sparks. (Yes, I was a latecomer). I loved them dearly and wore them on my green winter jacket. A few winters ago, I went on a trip to Amsterdam with my friend Zoe. When we got off the train from Schilpol to Amsterdam Centraal, there was naturally a huge group of people, and even as we were on the platform, I realized that I had lost my Ron badge, but it was too late. There was not going to be any searching around on the ground with such a massive hubbub. I like to think a Dutch Sparks fan found it and they lived happily ever after.
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Lost & Never Found Again: LOVE Night Light

When I was a child, in the six-to-eight-year-old zone, I was intensely into a myriad of unexplainables: particularly, UFO’s, Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, Frankenstein, etc. My fascination with these things, augmented by lots of reading, was offset by routine nightmares. Blood-curdling screams would jar my parents awake; they would come running to my bedside thinking that I was being killed by an intruder.
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Lost & Never Found Again: My Gameboy Advance

Man, it really shows the passage of time when you look up a product’s release date and it just seems like yesterday when you got your hands on it. I got my Gameboy Advance in 2001 as part of a “group gift” with my sister; she got a pink one, I got one of the translucent purple models. With it, I had received Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, which at the time entertained me to no end; I mean, I got to play as Spider-Man—as a comics nerd, I was in nirvana.

So it was during one of many summer trips that I learned a rule I still keep to this day: don’t lend anything out that you’re not prepared to lose. My brother, who had started enjoying video games himself, had pulled the ol’ “Share with me” argument with my mom, which kept him quietly kick-flipping all the way home.
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