Rocktrospectiva: The Mainstream Succesful "Why Do Birds Sing?" Turns 35

Released on 30 April 1991 "Why Do Birds Sing?" was the 5th., studio album by the US band Violent Femmes. It was the band's last album with original drummer Victor DeLorenzo, who left two years later to devote his time to acting, and was produced by Michael Beinhorn. The album spawned three singles, the hit "American Music," which rose to number 2 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart during the week of May 18, 1991, and became a staple of the band's live shows, also the Culture Club's Hit cover "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me", & the college rock classic "Used To Be." 

Why Do Birds Sing? was something of a return to form, if only in terms of having song after song of the kind of weirdly fractured folk pop that represented the band at their most accessible. Upbeat and straightforward album-opener "American Music" was placedssomewhere between campfire song and pop masterpiece, with subtle production details like sleighbells and sparingly used organ runs growing along with the song's steady build. The snarling cover of Culture Club's hit "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," the band chose to record this unlikely cover: We took it as a challenge,” laughs Gordon Gano, who reworked the majority of the lyrics, making the song sound like a Violent Femmes original. Ritchie adds, "It was an experiment that turned out really well…in fact, we bumped into Boy George once in a hotel bar and he told us, 'That is the best cover of any of our songs anyone’s ever done.'" the inverted girl group appropriation of "Look Like That," and the driving college rock of "Used to Be." 

The band's penchant for sardonic and juvenile humor remains intact on the faux-blues stomp of "Girl Trouble" and the shadowy clunk of "Make More Money," a bitter revenge story of the tormented high school nerd becoming a rich rock star. When Why Do Birds Sing? was first released, the Violent Femmes were already a decade into their career, enjoying cult success but still living mostly in the shadow of their debut. The album would be one of their most commercially successful up until that point, despite some critics finding it disjointed and a little too all-over-the-place stylistically. 

The album felt more solid, with its lesser moments strung together by some of the best songs the band ever penned, and production that makes space for both the Femmes' anxious demeanor and their not-so-secret love of big, dumb pop songs. As the band recorded Why Do Birds Sing?, they found themselves returning to their classic Violent Femmes-era sound, particularly with songs like "Out The Window" and "Look Like That." They also revisited several compositions from their earliest days, including  "Girl Trouble," "Life is a Scream," and "Flamingo Baby." 

The album pushed the Violent Femmes into their highest level of mainstream success—nearly a decade into their career. Over the next few years, the band became a must-see act at festivals like Lollapalooza and Woodstock '94, while their videos could be seen regularly on MTV. As the group was embraced by a new generation of fans, Violent Femmes entered the Billboard 200 for the first time since its release.

Why Do Birds Sing? Track List: 

 

1. American Music

2. Out The Window

3. Look Like That

4. Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?

5. Hey Nonny Nonny

6. Used To Be

7. Girl Trouble

8. He Likes Me

9. Life Is A Scream

10. Flamingo Baby

11. Lack Of Knowledge

12. More Money Tonight

13. I'm Free  

Rocktrospectiva: Blur's Brilliant "Charmless Man" Turns 30

Released on 29 April 1996 "Charmless Man" was the 4th., studio album by English rock band Blur, and it was the fourth track on their fourth studio album, The Great Escape (1995). It was produced by Stephen Street and released by Food Records and Parlophone on 29 April 1996 in the United Kingdom as the fourth and final single from that album. The single reached number five on the UK Singles Chart and also charted in Australia, France, Iceland, and Ireland. 

The accompanying UK B-sides, "The Horrors", "A Song" and "St. Louis", continued the dramatic change in style for Blur first evidenced on the "Stereotypes" single, being stark and raw, foreshadowing the stylistic shift that would realize itself on their eponymous follow-up album.

The inspiration for the song was a visit by Damon Albarn to his grandmother in Lincolnshire. He stopped off at Grantham railway station and when inside the gentlemen's toilet, he noticed a piece of graffiti on a similar theme to the song's title. 

Reviews praised the single considered probably the best track off "The Great Escape",This should restore Blur's status as a more-than-convincing chart band." Even Morrissey quoted the single by saying he liked it at the time.  

The music video for "Charmless Man" was directed by British film writer and director Jamie Thraves. It starts with a man (the Charmless Man, played by Jean-Marc Barr) running down a dark street with a makeshift bandage or wrapping on his right hand, while cross cut edits show Blur playing in a music hall. 

Track List: 

1. UK 7-inch and cassette single

• Charmless Man
• The Horrors 

2. UK CD Single

• Charmless Man
• The Horrors
• A Song
• St. Louis 

3. European CD Single

• Charmless Man
• The Man Who Left Himself 

New Music: Call It In

           

Editors are back, four years on since their last album, "EBM," the  indie rockers return with frantic new single "Call It In". The tune is another emotive guitar-driven track from the five-piece that arrives after frontman Tom Smith released his 2025 debut solo album, "We spent a lot of summer '25 holed up in rural Gloucestershire, working on songs with all of us in a room, in a more traditional band set up," Smith said in a press release. "'Call It In' is one of the newest songs we worked on, it’s a song about asking for help, really, in the presence of an existential dread, finding solace and comfort in someone close, escaping the deafening noise of modern life."

New Music: Punching The Flowers

            

Death Cab For Cutie have shared "Punching The Flowers", the second single from their 11th studio album I Built You A Tower, out 5th June via ANTI- Records. The track is described by frontman Benjamin Gibbard as a gnarled, angular rock song built around a real-life moment of a toddler having a tantrum and literally punching flowers outside a bodega, transformed into a metaphor for a man who finds something beautiful but feels caged by it, the video has been directed by Jason Lester‘Punching the Flowers’ is a song about stagnation and the feeling of being imprisoned by The Known,” Gibbard explains. “And about the damage done when someone ventures deeper into the unknown.”

 

Rocktrospectiva: The Formidable And Underrated "Whirlpool" Turns 35

Released on 29 April 1991, "Whirlpool" was the debut studio album by English shoegaze band Chapterhouse. The album spawned the single "Pearl", reaching No. 67 on the UK singles chart. 

Shoegaze had definitely reached its pinnacle in 1991, it was the year when My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless" came out, also Ride's "Nowhere" had been released a year before, these two albums earned a huge acclaimed from their audiences in the UK. Inspired by the likes of Slowdive and Ride, Chapterhouse were part of the short-lived Shoegazing scene of the early 90s, but unlike other acts who acquired a set of guitar pedals and headed off to the nearest recording studio, they mixed beats with their wall-of-sonic-guitar-fuzz to create records to stimulate both the mind and the feet!

Chapterhouse's Whirlpool mixed rock freakouts like those found in "Guilt", and the effect-laden "Falling Down", with drum-driven trips like the fast-moving "Breather", and the poppy "Pearl." Whirlpool took its samples and heavily rhythmic beats and mixes them gloriously into a sea of jangly, distorted guitars especially on lead single "Pearl". The pop melody was not hidden in this album, it was brilliantly twisted into ways never thought possible by the likes of this reviewer. Other songs used samples for a similar blending of cultures, showcasing the band's hard rock side with "Falling Down", a song which may sound obnoxiously filled with wah-wah pedal foolery but pays off - like most of these songs do - with an anthemic chorus which glorifies rock until an explosive climax.

The vocals, were one of the key element especially in opener, "Breather".  A seductive, out-of-breath, and atmospheric, they uplift the album with their sense of content, yet shroud it also in mystery with unintelligible lyrics, there where certain wrong elements like "Treasure" a 6:22 track that practically no one care about it, antoher low points were "Autosleeper" & "April" as the low points on the record too. 

The cover of this album described perfectly the sound inside this record, a warm lightning album based around pop melodies with certain slices of hard rock, spacey tunes, soaring vocals to put the listener as high as posible, an axcellent but underrated album. 

 

Whirlpool Track List:  

 

1. Breather

2. Pearl

3. Autosleeper

4. Treasure

5. Falling Down

6. April

7. Guilt

8. If You Want Me

9. Something More 

Rocktrospectiva: The Epic "10,000 Days" Turns 20

Released between 28-29 April 2006 in parts of Europe and Australia 1-2 May in the UK and USA, "10,000 Days" was the fourth studio album by US band Tool. It marked the first time since recording 1993's Undertow that the band had worked at Grandmaster and without producer David Bottrill. 10,000 Days spawned three top ten rock singles: "Vicarious", "The Pot", and "Jambi". It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, with first week sales of 564,000 copies. 10,000 Days was Tool's last release for more than a decade; the band would not release their next studio album, Fear Inoculum, until August 30, 2019.

 

Tool recorded the album at O'Henry Sound Studios in Burbank, as well as at The Loft and Grandmaster Studios in Hollywood, California. It was mixed at Bay 7 in North Hollywood, CA and mastered at Gateway Mastering Studios in Portland, Maine.

 

Guitarist Adam Jones employed various recording techniques for the album, including a "pipe bomb mic" (a guitar pickup mounted inside a brass cylinder), and a talk box guitar solo on the song "Jambi." Drummer Danny Carey operated many of the sound effects on the interlude tracks on the album using electronic drums called Mandalas. 10,000 Days has a heavier sound than its predecessor, largely because of the influence of avant-garde metal band Fantômas, who toured with Tool before the writing process.

 

The title 10,000 Days is thought to refer to the orbital period of the planet Saturn (the actual time period is 10,759 days). According to singer Maynard James Keenan, the Saturn return is "the time in your twenty eighth, twenty ninth year when you are presented the opportunity to transform from whatever your hang-ups were before to let the light of knowledge and experience lighten your load, so to speak, and let go of old patterns and embrace a new life." Keenan expected that the songs composed would "chronicle that process, hoping that my gift back would be to share that path and hope that I could help somebody get past that spot." The title 10,000 Days additionally refers to the amount of time that Maynard's mother, Judith Marie Gridley, was paralyzed.

 

In an interview, Alex Grey, who worked on the illustrations for the 10,000 Days and Lateralus covers, said that many of his artworks for Tool have been based on and influenced by the visionary journeys of a brew called ayahuasca. He described the 10,000 Days cover as "a blazing vision of an infinite grid of Godheads during an ayahuasca journey", and also talked about the Lateralus cover in a similar fashion. Grey stated in another interview when making the 10,000 Days cover that it depicts visions received during a DMT trip.

 

The album received generally favorable reviews, albeit with less enthusiasm than previous Tool albums. Most critics praised the album as another example of Tool's musicianship.  Critics who gave 10,000 Days a relatively low score questioned the merits of its ambient interludes, which Tool have also used on their previous releases. However, the album received a Grammy Award in 2006 for Best Recording Package. That same year, the song "Vicarious" was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance. In 2008, 10,000 Days garnered another Grammy nomination when "The Pot" was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance. 

 

Other reviews praised the album for re-embracing of the epic-length rock songs found at the roots of early heavy metal, while others called the album as probably the most engagingly brilliant heavy metal album that'll be released on a major label all year.

 

10,000 Days Track List:  

 

1. Vicarious

2. Jambi

3. Wings For Marie (Pt 1)

4. 10,000 Days (Wings Pt 2)

5. The Pot

6. Lipan Conjuring

7. Lost Keys (Blame Hofmann)

8. Rosetta Stoned

9. Intension

10. Right In Two

11. Viginiti Tres

The Compilation: Now Vault '85

NOW That’s What I Call Music continue with their Yearbook Vault releases of "lesser compiled" tracks with a look at 1985. 4CD and 3LP coloured vinyl collections dig deep into the year’s musical landscape – with 78 tracks on the CD editions and 45 songs across three coloured (green) vinyl LPs.

The 4CD set – which comes in the usual deluxe hardcover book and card sleeve editions opens with Bruce Springsteen’s "My Hometown" – the last single from the mega-selling Born in the USA before moving on to Bryan Ferry and Sting with "Windswept" and "Love is the Seventh Wave". Both of those songs are classic Vault tracks: great tracks off classic albums (Boys and Girls and The Dream of the Blue Turtles, respectively) that peaked WAY short of where many assume they did (neither cracked the UK top 40). Go West’s "Eye to Eye" was only a single in the US, while ABC's "Be Near Me" was released both sides of the Atlantic, but fared much better Stateside. This disc continues with offerings from Fine Young Cannibals, China Crisis, Simply Red, Thompson Twins and the Art of Noise.

The second disc has an alternative flavour, at least initially, with songs from Cocteau Twins, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Dream Academy and New Model Army before widening it’s net and scoping up minor hits from the likes of Tina Turner, Matt Bianco, Chris Rea and Squeeze.

CD3 has a dance floor slant with tracks including Cameo’s brilliant "She's Strange", Sheryl Lee Ralph's "In The Evening", the Stock Aitken Waterman produced "The Heaven I Need" by The Three Degrees and Divine's cover of "Twisting The Night Away". Elton John & Millie Jackson's "Act of War"  was a minor hit a few years before Nikita revived Reg's commercial success in the UK.

CD 4 has the kind of artists oftenly find on US compilations from the 80's such as Pat Benetar, Bon Jovi, John Mellencamp, Kim Carnes, Dio, The Cars, Rick Springfield etc. 

NOW Yearbook Vault ’85 will be released on 15 May 2026.

Track List: 

CD 1

1. Bruce Springsteen – My Hometown

2. Bryan Ferry – Windswept

3. Sting – Love Is The Seventh Wave

4. Go West – Eye To Eye

5. Scritti Politti – Perfect Way

6. ABC – Be Near Me

7. Fine Young Cannibals – Blue

8. The Colourfield – Castles In The Air

9. China Crisis – You Did Cut Me

10. Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – La Femme Accident

11. Midge Ure – That Certain Smile

12. Blancmange – What’s Your Problem

13. Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder – Good-Bye Bad Times

14. Heaven 17 – …(And That’s No Lie)

15. Simply Red- Come To My Aid

16. The Style Council – Come To Milton Keynes

17. The Power Station- Communication

18. Adam Ant – Vive Le Rock

19. Thompson Twins – Revolution

20. TheArt Of Noise- Legs

 

CD 2

 

1. Cocteau Twins – Aikea-Guinea

2. The Jesus And Mary Chain- Just Like Honey

3. The Dream Academy-The Love Parade

4. Elvis Costello & The Attractions – Green Shirt

5. The Clash – This Is England

6. The Stranglers – Let Me Down Easy

7. The Damned – The Shadow Of Love

8. Sisters Of Mercy- No Time To Cry

9. New Model Army-No Rest

10. This Island Earth – See That Glow

11. Marillion- Heart Of Lothian

12. Bonnie Tyler with Todd Rundgren – Loving You’s A Dirty Job (But Somebody’s Gotta Do It)

13. Tina Turner – Show Some Respect

14. Princess – After The Love Has Gone

15. Loose Ends – Golden Years

16. Brilliant- It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World

17. Matt Bianco-More Than I Can Bear

18. Daryl Hall & John Oates – Method Of Modern Love

19. Chris Rea- Stainsby Girls

20. Squeeze – Last Time Forever

 

CD 3

 

1. Sheryl Lee Ralph – In The Evening

2. Barbara Pennington – On A Crowded Street

3. Miquel Brown – Close To Perfection

4. The Three Degrees – The Heaven I Need

5. Hazell Dean- They Say It’s Gonna Rain

6. Laura Branigan-Spanish Eddie

7. Divine – Twistin’ The Night Away

8. Eddie Murphy – Party All The Time

9. Patti LaBelle – New Attitude

10. Elton John & Millie Jackson – Act Of War (Part 1)

11. The Pointer Sisters – Baby Come And Get It

12. Ready For The World – Oh Sheila

13. The Limit – Say Yeah

14. Mary Jane Girls – In My House

15. Steve Arrington – Dancing In The Key Of Life

16. Cameo – She’s Strange

17. Sister Sledge- Dancing On The Jagged Edge

18. Five Star – R.S.V.P.

19. Eighth Wonder – Stay With Me

20. Marilyn – Baby U Left Me (In The Cold)

 

CD 4

 

1. Billy Joel – You’re Only Human (Second Wind)

2. David Lee Roth- California Girls

3. John Mellencamp – Small Town

4.Bon Jovi – In And Out Of Love

5. Dio – Rock ‘N’ Roll Children

6. Pat Benatar – Invincible

7. Kim Carnes – Crazy In The Night (Barking At Airplanes)

8. Oingo Boingo – Weird Science (From “Weird Science” Soundtrack)

9. Animotion – Let Him Go

10. The Cars – Tonight She Comes

11. ‘Til Tuesday – Voices Carry

12. Foreigner- That Was Yesterday

13. Journey – Only The Young

14. Rick Springfield – State Of The Heart

15. Michael McDonald- No Lookin’ Back

16. Philip Bailey – Walking On The Chinese Wall

17. Chaka Khan- Through The Fire

18. Whitney Houston – You Give Good Love

New Music: Duvateen

           

The Afghan Whighs released another new track, "Duvateen." According to a press release, it's named for the light manipulating material, "which here serves as a symbol for morality." The song builds up a huge swell of sentimentality around Greg Dulli's peerless voice as he reflects on his own life journey. When I finished "Duvateen," it felt like my life passing before my eyes. The references to the teacher chasing me down the hall reminded me of my childhood. Digging a hole was an obvious allusion to a grave. I’m at a precipice in life where I can look behind and clearly see the forest of my youth, but I can also see the path to the other side. And it’s going to inform what I do for the rest of my days, said Dulli.

New Music: Out Of Place

            

Trip hop pioneer Tricky will be releasing his 15th studio album, Different When It’s Silent July 17, 2026 through his own label, False Idols. The new album is the first full-length effort from the legendary and influential artist and producer under his own name in six years. Different When It’s Silent came about during a rather prolific period of activity. Since 2020’s Fall to Pieces, Tricky has released material under several different guises including, Lonely Guest‘s 2021 self-titled effort, a collaboration with Mike Theis, called Theis Thaws, which released 2024’s Fifteen Days and last year’s collaborative album with Marta Złakowska, Out The Way. Different When It’s Silent's first single "Out of Place" feat. Marta Złakowska features a brooding and cinematic string sample introduction before morphing to a breakneck middle section which features Tricky's imitable gravelly vocal with a punchy, almost punk-like deliver and Złakowska's sultry yet restrained crooning. The song closes with a boarding and cinematic string sample. The result is as song that’s simultaneously forceful, uneasy and gorgeous while evoking the sweaty, self-aware sensation of somehow being out of place in your environment through a shifting series of contrasts. Originally written for Złakowska’s own album, Tricky ultimately reclaimed the song for the forthcoming album. Directed and edited by Steve Gullick, the accompanying video for “Out of Place” features the collaborators shot in blurred and constant motion in the foreground. In the background we see stylishly shot footage of each artist singing their respective part — or just being in a brooding photo shoot. It further emphasizes the feeling of being out of place. 

New Music: Billy Says

           

Graham Coxon released the single "Billy Says," the first of ten songs from "Castle Park"  the never-heard-before 2011 album while reissuing all of his solo records. The Blur guitarist turned solo star and one half of The Waeve  will be reissuing all of his solo albums over the next 12 months, starting with his 1998 debut "The Sky Is Too High" and 2000 follow-up' "The Golden D" arriving on 19 June. produced by Ben Hillier, the album was recorded in 2011 as part of the sessions for 'A+E' and originally intended as a follow up his eight solo LP, but postponed due to Blur’s initial reunion and then abandoned as Coxon moved on to other projects. "Billy Says", a regular feature from Coxon’s live sets and echoing the album’s classic Mod sound with hints of The Kinks and the guitarists inimitable knack for a sweet and simple guitar-pop hook.