Seconds Apart

Creepy-crawly atmosphere in summer: On 26th July, the Finnish monsters LORDI release their brand-new DVD "Recordead Live - Sextourcism In Z7" via AFM Records. Besides the live cut of the show in Pratteln/Switzerland during their latest "Sextourcism" tour, the DVD provides a lot of bonus material, including some real rarities…

Sugar Ray is one of the most successful bands of the 90s/00s, having recorded four Top 10 singles (including two #1 singles) and sold over 10 million albums. Melding hair metal and hardcore punk with sampledelic hip-hop, New Wave, disco, and dub, Sugar Ray made music “like kids in a candy store,” crafting an idiosyncratic and utterly distinctive groove as inventive and forward-thinking as any critics’ darling of the era. This new Greatest Hits compiles their classic singles, as well as other hits chosen by the band, including a cover of Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out With Him,” off their 2005 album In The Pursuit of Leisure.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Beatles intended Abbey Road as a grand farewell, a suspicion seemingly confirmed by the elegiac note Paul McCartney strikes at the conclusion of its closing suite. It’s hard not to interpret “And in the end / the love you take / is equal to the love you make” as a summation not only of Abbey Road but perhaps of the group’s entire career, a lovely final sentiment. The truth is perhaps a bit messier than this. The Beatles had tentative plans to move forward after the September 1969 release of Abbey Road, plans that quickly fell apart at the dawn of the new decade, and while the existence of that goal calls into question the intentionality of the album as a finale, it changes not a thing about what a remarkable goodbye the record is.