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np: "Mind Eraser, No Chaser" - Them Crooked Vultures

Before taking off to enjoy lots of food and the long holiday weekend, I thought it would be a good time to get a few thoughts out on some recent-ish releases before we get well into year-end wrap up season when December rolls around.

Them Crooked Vultures - Them Crooked Vultures (DGC/Interscope)
We all know by now that rock supergroups rarely, if ever, live up to the hype and potential. The better ones serve as entertaining detours from the members' main projects and the worse ones are understandably lost in the sands of time. As fantastic as this particular project sounded on paper, Dave Grohl + Josh Homme + John Paul Jones = OMG, my instincts were telling me to brace more for the latter when the album finally came out. Mainly because, well, the combination sounded too good to be true and that usually signals the death knell for supergroups. As it turns out, however, this is actually pretty good. Essential? No. Definitive? No. Best mainstream rock album of the year? Possibly. Things definitely rotate more around the Homme/Queens of the Stone Age axis than anything else, but Grohl and JPJ certainly make their distinctive marks. If you have no problem with meandering riff-fests featuring thunderous drums, huge bass lines, and the odd mandolin solo - you'll probably get a kick out of this.



Weezer - Raditude (DGC/Interscope)
I've long ago made peace with the fact that we're never going to get another Blue Album or Pinkerton, I'm fine with that - those particular albums meant a lot in a particular time and place that can never be recreated. But now I need to accept that these guys aren't even going to give us another Maladroit or Make Believe. It's just not in them, Rivers has moved on to a different place entirely. Not sure exactly where that place is, maybe a universe where he considers himself king of the Top 40. Last year's Red Album gave us about three decent to kinda good songs and a huge pile of steaming crap. Ditto for this year's Raditude. And, surprisingly, the song featuring Lil Wayne isn't the worst. I think I'll save that particular distinction for Patrick Wilson's "In the Mall". Download "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To", "Put Me Back Together", and bonus track "The Prettiest Girl in the Whole Wide World" and save yourself from the rest of the mess.



Converge - Axe To Fall (Epitaph)
Just how good can one band get? Converge could have called it a day after 2001's genre-defining Jane Doe (a cathartic napalm blast of an album that should already be in the collection of any fan of heavy music) and cemented their reputation as one of the decade's best. But no, they followed that up with two albums (You Fail Me and No Heroes) that damn near as good, particularly the latter. Still wasn't enough for these guys. They had to go and ring out the decade with an album even better than Jane Doe. Seriously. The band is as ferocious as ever, but spent much of the album spinning off into multiple different genres and proving that they can excel at nearly every single one of them - sludge, doom, shoegaze, buzzsaw metal solos - they're all here. Of particular interest are the final two tracks, both stylistic departures that are no less successful than the rest of the disc.