Last Felt

Over the last decade, Cleveland wunderkind Dylan Baldi’s Cloud Nothings project has evolved from a ramshackle, home-recorded indie-pop concern to a full-blown punk-pop outfit combining melodic sweetness, pummeling arrangements, and throat-searing vocals. Their previous album, 2017’s Life Without Sound, found Baldi and co. dialing back their characteristic aggression a bit. But on Cloud Nothings’ fifth album, Baldi’s coruscated bark is back in action, along with the hook-laden intensity that’s been present since 2012’s breakthrough Attack on Memory. The band’s penchant for epic song structures has also returned (see: the ebb and flow of the 11-minute “Dissolution”), as Last Building Burning represents Cloud Nothings doing what they do best with zero frills and plenty of passion to spare.

As a film, The Last Waltz was a triumph - one of the first (and still one of the few) rock concert documentaries that was directed by a filmmaker who understood both the look and the sound of rock & roll, and executed with enough technical craft to capture all the nooks and crannies of a great live show. But as an album, The Last Waltz soundtrack had to compete with the Band's earlier live album, Rock of Ages, with which it bears a certain superficial resemblance - both found the group trying to create something grander than the standard-issue live double, and both featured the group beefed up by additional musicians. While Rock of Ages found the Band swinging along with the help of a horn section arranged by Allen Toussaint, The Last Waltz boasts a horn section (using Toussaint's earlier arrangements on a few cuts) and more than a baker's dozen guest stars, ranging from old cohorts Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan to contemporaries Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Van Morrison…

Jade Warrior never scored a hit single and it seems bizarre to think that anyone ever dreamed it could. Buried away on side two of its third album, however, "The Demon Trucker" not only has unexpected smash written all over it, but the words were large enough that the band's U.K. label Vertigo clearly felt the same way…

The Last Days of Oakland is an album by Fantastic Negrito. It earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album.

Jade Warrior never scored a hit single and it seems bizarre to think that anyone ever dreamed it could. Buried away on side two of its third album, however, "The Demon Trucker" not only has unexpected smash written all over it, but the words were large enough that the band's U.K. label Vertigo clearly felt the same way. One must sincerely regret there never came a day when a nation's pop kids were ordered to "throw their hands up to the ceiling, get out on the floor and stamp your feet with feeling." Or maybe they were, but only when Slade told them to. Coming from a band better-known for weird flute solos and complicated time signatures, the demand was possibly less compulsive. It's still a great song, though, one of the finest rock & rolling dance numbers of the age and, if the remainder of Last Autumn's Dream doesn't quite match those same pounding, resounding peaks…

Though Alice Cooper's 1989 comeback gave him his first hit album in over a decade, the Trash record left some diehard fans disappointed, as did 1991's Hey Stoopid. Many listeners felt that Cooper had sold himself short, now completely focusing on sleazy sexual anthems, making him just another face in the heavy metal crowd. By the time The Last Temptation was released in 1994, the hair band fad that had fueled Cooper's return was dead, and Cooper was obviously aware of its downfall – the album sounds almost nothing like its two predecessors. Instead of relating to such albums as Motley Crue's Dr. Feelgood, Last Temptation seems more similar to Ozzy Osbourne's No More Tears.