billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - august 17, 2019 (VIDEO)

So, lengthy episode, but I am happy I got to it all the same - good stuff!

Next up... well, I'm on vacation, so I'd venture over to my instagram to keep up to date on what's coming, so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - august 17, 2019

You know, I should just give up making these sorts of predictions one of these days. Here I go thinking that we wouldn't get much of an impact this week, that things would slow down, some of it even based on the evidence that the last time Drake reissued a project - that being So Far Gone - it didn't hit the charts that strongly. And yet apparently just enough time as passed to get a sizable compliment to hit the Hot 100, along with a bunch of assorted pop country because Billboard wants to make my life difficult before I go on vacation - go figure.

album reviews: 'songs for the saints' by kenny chesney / 'all of it' by cole swindell / 'steak night at the prairie rose' by mike & the moonpies (VACATION)

And finally, we're done with the vacation reviews - next up should be Idles, but before that...

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 10, 2018 (VIDEO)

And here we are - I'm actually a little surprised with as many debuts as we got this is actually out on time.

Okay, Phonte is up next, stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 10, 2018

So it's pretty rare I get surprised on the Hot 100 - I've been doing this for three and a half years and I have chart records going back to the 2000s, I generally have an expectation what'll land here and be successful, and I've been long conditioned by disappointment to not expect the best. But it seems like this week we got a few welcome surprises that not only met my low expectations for this week, but might have even exceeded them. I'm not saying it was precisely a great week or that any of these new arrivals will last, but some of these are encouraging.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - april 29, 2017 (VIDEO)

So this week... as I said on Patreon, I'm not precisely pleased with the thumbnail, but I think the episode turned out okay, which is fine.

Next up, Deep Purple and then something I should have tackled a month ago - stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - april 29, 2017

If this was any normal week, I'd be inclined to say it was transitional, an otherwise regular week as older tracks rotate out in preparation for spring. Maybe even a little unexceptional, given that The Chainsmokers seem to have finally hit their fifteenth minute with no new songs from their debut album making a significant impact. But this is not an ordinary week, because with the monstrous streaming numbers that Kendrick Lamar's DAMN. is currently racking up, it's a more a question of which tracks will survive what's coming.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - august 13, 2016 (VIDEO)

Well, this was an interesting episode. Not really a good one, but eh, what can you do?

Next up, DJ Khaled and Jake Owen, so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - august 13, 2016

You know, there's an adage I have on this show that the Canadian charts are always better, mostly because we didn't get rid of rock radio and we at least try to cultivate more unique Canadian acts. And yet if we look at the 2016 Hot 100, which many critics are already claiming is one of the worst years on record for this decade, it's been dominated by two Canadian artists coasting more off production than any sort of lyrical or vocal personality. Now I could make the argument that we as Canadians tend to manufacture some distance with our stars - Drake and Bieber have both been bigger south of the border than they have here - but on the other hand, we did let Bieber debut at #1 where he only landed #2 this week, so take it as you will.

video review: 'you should be here' by cole swindell

Wow, this was a real surprise. Didn't expect this to be all that good, but it turned out to be pretty decent. Go figure.

Next up, I think I'm ready for Aesop Rock and (sigh) Keith Urban, so stay tuned!

album review: 'you should be here' by cole swindell

So, for those of you who have been watching since the very beginning when I discussed the rise and fall of bro-country know that I took a bit of a complicated position surrounding the subgenre - namely that I didn't hate it altogether. I'm not sure what it was, maybe some lingering sympathies from my own bro tendencies, or maybe it was that even despite how stupid it could get, if played with sincerity and production with a little more meat or writing with a bit more tact, you could actually get decent music. 

Of course, the majority of bro-country acts maybe got one out of three on a good day and we got a whole lot of mediocrity, of which I had no qualms giving the thorough thrashing it deserved - when bro-country was good, I had no problems celebrating it, but when it was bad, I wasn't about to avoid an easy target. And one of the easiest was Cole Swindell, a former fratmate and merch manager for Luke Bryan who became a songwriter and later released a debut album I slagged as being one of the most formulaic, badly produced, and sloppily written bro-country records ever made. Until Thomas Rhett came along, Cole Swindell represented the absolute worst of bro-country for me: he might not have been the most obnoxious or processed or have the most offensive writing, but he represented the numb, sterile blandness that came to saturate country radio's mindless attempt to jump on a trend.

But let's be honest: bro-country is effectively over at this point, and Cole Swindell now had to prove he was more than just a trend. And with his lead-off single, the title track of this album that was a tribute to his late father, he actually convinced me to give him another chance. Sure, the percussion and production was too synthetic for my tastes and much of the melody line reminded me way too much of Luke Bryan's 'Crash My Party', but the writing had enough detail to feel authentic and real, even if it is framed through a bro-country lens. So, believe it or not, I had some real hope going into this album that we might see a more interesting or introspective side of Cole Swindell - did we get that?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - january 2, 2016 (VIDEO)

Goddamnit, this took WAY too long to get online - and really, it's entirely YouTube's fault, because I went back to the original video file and it was FINE. But apparently it glitched out at some point and because I'm a perfectionist (mostly), I fought through hell to get it reuploaded.

In any case, Pusha T and Baroness to get done tonight, so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - january 2, 2016

I'll be blunt and say it - if this week didn't have The Voice, the charts would be significantly less interesting. And if I actually took some of you up on the suggestions to just avoid covering hits from The Voice, it'd actually be a pretty short week, but considering this was another deceptive week where things do not appear all that interesting outside of it thanks to the holiday slowdown, I might as well discuss it in more detail - it's not like the other new entries appear that much better.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - august 22, 2015 (VIDEO)

So this happened. Dear god, this episode took so long to finish...

Okay, next up it's going to get dark with Chelsea Wolfe, so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - august 22, 2015

...I'm starting to think the summer lull is a complete load of shit. Because right after another fairly reasonable week, we get one of the most crazy weeks I've seen in a while. Major shifts up and down, a considerable chunk of new songs, and new top ten debuts, and even a new number one! And while some of it I could reasonably predict - the One Direction debut was no surprise - I wasn't expecting the return of the Drake show or the arrival of a slew of Disney songs! I mean, seriously, what the hell is going on?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - january 17, 2015 (VIDEO)

Dear god, this was a rough week - although, bizarrely, nowhere near as bad as I was expecting. Let's hope for the best next week, where I have a very manageable number of album reviews and I'm expecting to deal with the extended aftermath of Rae Sremmurd. Lovely. Either way, stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - january 17, 2015

So once again this week we're dealing with the last fragments of 2014, even as the new hits of 2015 begin to rise up the charts. And yet even despite the turnover to a new #1 - trust me, we'll get to it, I'm as excited as anyone - I can't help but look down past the justly deserved gains and see a whole load of crap bubbling up to the surface. Folks, there are some bad songs that dropped this week, and believe me, it's not going to be pretty cleaning them out.

video review: 'cole swindell' by cole swindell

Ugh, glad I could get through this. 

Next up, probably Angel Olson or Schoolboy Q. Stay tuned!

album review: 'cole swindell' by cole swindell

I have no idea why I'm doing this review.

And at this point, does anyone care? Does anyone want to hear me deliver yet another discussion/rant about bro-country like the half-dozen other times I've done it in front of every other act in this vein I've covered? I've given this particular subgenre more intellectual consideration and brain cells than it deserves, talked about the good albums and the bad albums, and at this point, I don't know what else to say. Despite songwriters, country artists, and even radio programmers saying that we've hit peak bro-country a good few months back, we're still getting artists coming out of the woodwork trying to cash in! How and why does this keep happening?

Well, in the case of Cole Swindell, I actually have an answer for that. See, what you might not know is that bro-country superstar Luke Bryan and popular Nashville songwriter Dallas Davidson were roommates at Georgia Southern University. Well, it turns out - and this is so hilariously ironic I couldn't believe it when I first read it - that Luke Bryan belonged to the fraternity Sigma Chi, and so did Cole Swindell. In fact, Swindell sold merchandise for Luke Bryan for three years before trying to make it as a songwriter himself. Fortunately for him, he hitched his star to the right wagon, Luke Bryan and bro-country became the biggest things in country music, and Cole Swindell became his opening act. 

Now Cole Swindell is a bit unique in comparison with most bro-country acts, in that he doesn't really rely on the Nashville songwriting machine as heavily (indeed, there's not a single Dallas Davidson song on the album, which did surprise me) and he has writing credits on all of his songs. Hell, he's even written songs for other artists like Luke Bryan, Florida Georgia Line, Thomas Rhett, Scotty McCreery, and even Chris Young's half-hearted stab at bro-country last year. The bad news is that everything he's written is terrible, some of the worst songs on the albums in question and at best only rising to being interchangeable and bland. And that was one of the reasons I didn't want to cover this album, just abuse it for five minutes.