True Faith – Anberiln
This song is wow from the first listen. It’s got an instant energy from the moment it starts its synthesizer-packed beats.
The song has an eighties pop feel to it in the string-effect keyboards and new age electronica style. And if you’re wondering why the quintet Florida band that usually wails emotional rock songs is pumping out this 80’s backed energy, it’s because the song is not an Anberlin original but was actually originally done by New Order.
The song has been given a rock uplift by Anberlin the way alloy wheels can add a bit of spunk to an already new age gull-wing door Delorean DMC-12 sports car.
The chorus reminds you that 3OH!3’s hit, Don’t Trust This, but vocalist Stephen Christian adds some new dynamics to his style in this track.
Free Me by Joss Stone
The barefooted beauty is back! Usually skipping and prancing around stage with pools and drapes of dress chaffing her every movement, the British Soul singer charmed audiences two years ago with the release of her album, Introducing Joss Stone.
Her charming ways have gotten her punked by Ashton Kutcher; jamming with Jeff Beck in his big old country house; rumored (wrongly) to have been asked by President Obama to write a song for him; and appearing on the TV series, The Tudors. These charming ways however, also include trying to make an album in a small restaurant cum club owned by her mother, and to record music when builders aren’t busy reconstructing and refurbishing the place.
The album spawned from these intriguing studio arrangements is called Color Me Free and the lead single taken off it is the soul-rich song,
When asked about the song in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Stone replied, ‘“It’s kind of the title track, really (that’s) just about independence and allowing people to be free and to make their music and their art freely, without somebody sat there telling them how to do so. That’s my slant. But other people can look at it differently.”
Life After You – Daughtry
”All that I am after is a life filled with laughter.” That’s the simple wish of the kind of rock band that no radio station would refuse to play and that dedicate much of their album acknowledgments to their wives. This is not the kind of band that growls at you with rock aggression or drapes themselves with bleach-blond groupies. This is the kind of band that make it to the top of the adult pop charts more than once.
Although Chris Daughtry may not be the record breaking American Idol protégé that Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood became, he has managed to quietly and steadily amass a following that is now staying faithful for a second time around, as he released his follow up to his self-titled debut.
The song, Life After You, is the second single to be taken off Daughtry’s charttopping second album, Leave This Town. The song was co-written by Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger and was performed late last year at the American Music Awards.
The Southern Rock Foos are Fighting their way back to radio airplay. They were always considered to be the band that could never be as groundbreaking as Nirvana and was largely underrated because of that. But if you collate all the songs that we’ve loved listening to on radio for the past 10 years or so, from the machine-gun guitar fire of Monkey Wrench, to the power pop of Everlong, to the lighter shade of grunge in Times Like These and All My Life, to the pounding angst in Best of You, you will see that the Foo Fighters have been intrinsic to the generation that their Nirvana past helped mould the grunge-loving, scraggly hair, dirty ripped jeans, kids to smell like teen spirit.
If you are the kind of person who wouldn’t just freeze or stutter when you see the person you’ve been crushing on right in front of you, if you’re the kind of person who would dive on to the ground of a subway station just so he wouldn’t see you, even though all you’ve been wishing for is that he’d notice you, then you’re the kind of person who would understand this song.