Sevendust - Chapter VII: Hope and Sorrow [2008]
Sevendust are back with their seventh studio album, Chapter VII: Hope & Sorrow, produced by Sean Groove, Morgan Rose & John Connolly. The release will be their second on the band’s wholly owned record label, 7Bros. Records under Warner Music Group’s Asylum/Independent Label Group.
For the first time since Animosity (2001), the band has collaborated with outside artists, including Chris Daughtry and members of Alterbridge. First single, “Prodigal Son”, will be impacting Active and Mainstream Rock radio on February 10th, with a video soon to follow. Sevendust will be touring in support of the album throughout the year.
The March 2007 release of Alpha, the bands sixth studio album and first on 7Bros. Records, saw Sevendust equal their highest Billboard album ranking of their career with a first week debut at #14 on the Billboard Top 200, selling 42,398 copies. With even more radio hits packed into the new album, Sevendust looks forward to continuing to raise the bar.
Full Album Tracks Listing
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1. Inside
2. Enough
3. Hope
4. Scapegoat
5. Fear
6. The Past
7. Prodigal Son
8. Lifeless
9. Sorrow
10. Contradiction
11. Walk Away
The Gin Blossoms were one of the more truly damned rock & roll bands to grace the pop charts in the early 1990s. The group was founded and spiritually led by singer-guitarist Doug Hopkins, who also wrote the band’s best songs; by the time New Miserable Experience, the band’s major-label debut, was released, Hopkins had been kicked out (his bandmates had apparently tired of dealing with his alcoholism). Shortly after the album’s release Hopkins killed himself, and the band subsequently enjoyed the biggest hit of its career with “‘Til I Hear It From You” (which, perversely, never appeared on a Gin Blossoms album, but only on the Empire Records soundtrack). The band dropped from sight not long after. New Miserable Experience remains the best and most representative document of the group’s existence, a tight and lean collection of brilliant, edgy pop music. “Hey Jealousy” and “Until I Fall Away” are the two songs that leave the deepest impression, but the crunchy melodicism and lyrical desperation of “Hold Me Down” sticks with you as well. Two dilettantish genre pieces — “Cajun Song” and a country weeper called “Cheatin’” (as in “you can’t call it cheatin’ ’cause she reminds me of you”) — provide the program’s two low points, but even those aren’t completely without charm. Review by Rick Anderson @ allmusic.com
After selling hundreds of thousands of records as part of Sunz Of Man, Hell Razah releases his official debut album, "Renaissance Child." Boasting nothing but power-packed rhymes, Razah easily holds his own alongside heavyweight features such as MF DOOM, Talib Kweli, Ras Kass, Killah Priest, Tragedy Khadafi and R.A. the Rugged Man. Even the production team enlisted here is first rate, with flawless beats from MF DOOM, 4th Disciple, Bronze Nazareth and more. "Renaissance Child" is a meaningful and intelligent record which is a breath of fresh air in today’s stale era of so-called hip-hop. The Rennaisance has begun.
It’s easy to take potshots at actors turned musicians, since it often seems like the actors are taking advantage of their celebrity by turning into recording stars. This ignores two facts: first, often these actors have been playing music for as long as they’ve been acting; and second, who’s to say that these critics, if put in the same position, wouldn’t take advantage of their celebrity to pursue their dream projects? In the case of 30 Seconds to Mars, the metallic post-grunge quartet led by Jared Leto (after all these years, still best-known as Jordan Catalano on the alt rock-era TV series My So-Called Life, although he has been excellent in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream and David Fincher’s Fight Club and Panic Room, as well), these actor-turned-musician arguments don’t really matter since, by any measure, the band is quite awful. A melange of U2 atmospherics, grunge angst, gothic brooding, and metal guitars, the band floats out of time, inspired heavily by ’90s alt rock but too clean, heavy, and facile to truly be part of that tradition, yet too indebted to the past to sound like part of the 2000s, either. Their second album, 2005’s A Beautiful Lie — whose title is uncomfortably close to Nine Inch Nails’ “Terrible Lie” (and is most likely not borrowed from the Amazing Rhythm Aces’ 1975 song of the same name, either) — is a little tighter and more streamlined than their eponymous 2002 debut, but the basic angst-ridden rock remains the same. Leto isn’t a terrible singer — a little too breathy at times and a little too inclined to dive into a full-throated scream, but not terrible — and the bandmembers are capable enough at shifting from tense quiet verses to piledriving, heavy choruses, but they borrow the worst habits from all their favorite groups, and then assemble them in insufferably earnest fashion, playing clichés as if they were revelations. It’s a bleak yet hammy collection of self-absorbed gloom-rock, a record where an allusion to the title of the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” is treated as something soul-searching and profound (of course, it does hurt that A Beautiful Lie is being released just a month before “Just Like Heaven” is being borrowed for the title of a Reese Witherspoon romantic comedy). It’s clear that Leto and the rest of 30 Seconds to Mars really mean it, man — this is as earnest as an emo record gets. Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine @ allmusic.com
