Welcome to the meandering musical insights of Aaron Joy (me!), formerly known as the Roman Midnight Music Blog. Here you'll find nearly 750 reviews of CDs & DVDs of rock & metal in all its variations, mainstream & indie, good & bad, U.S. & foreign. A new review every Monday.

Please share these reviews & feel free to copy them to your website or link to them. No downloads to be found here.

Are you a musician with an album?? Please e-mail me (aronmatyas @ hotmail.com) your album, EPK, etc. Or, hit me up for a physical address (I'm in Portland, Maine). If you don't have an EPK, I have a soft spot for personal handwritten letters from the local musician who just plays around town. I'm a bassist & do this blog partly to share music I love & partly to help the little guy, like myself, just looking for some attention. Promo companies are always welcomed to reach out.

You can support this blog by buying my books via amazon, or your local bookseller, or seeing my website www.aaronjoyauthor.weebly.com.

October 4, 2010

Million Dollar Mouth ~ The panicKING (album review) ... No panicking allowed!


Style: hard rock, alt rock
Label: Atonal Records
Year: 2010
Home: Los Angeles, California

Members: Mike Biscotti ~ vocals
Mary S. ~ keyboards/b. vocals
Vanja Andrin ~ guitars
80 ~ bass
Kris Keane ~ drums



My first thought hearing this band was the Killers but with a lot more punk, albeit a wall of sound like the Stone Temple Pilots but the same indie pop & sexual attitude of both of them. I'll confess that when MDM came recommended to me I knew after a brief listen they didn't have the hard rock edge that I typically listen for in potential reviews, let alone I don't listen to a lot of the alt rock that seems to have become a majority of bands today ... to the joy of teenage girls everywhere. But, listening to a smattering of tunes from The PanicKING by MDM I enjoyed their music so much that, try as might to ignore them & write them off as not workable for this blog's range, I kept listening to their songs again & again. They may not be the hard rock I gravitate to, but they have an interesting sound which is the other requirement of this blog. I often talk to friends about will happen when the 80's icons, like U2, are gone. Who will pick up the pen & compose the next "With Or Without You", let alone create a musical sound based on something more than a handful of sloppy chords & a heart attack in three notes, plus provide a listening alternative to the transparent dance beats that crawl up the music charts with playful abandon only to be abandoned months later? A band like MDM demonstrates that there are bands out there still trying to create something emotional, lyrically interesting & with a dynamic musical wall of unpredictable nuances, let alone a collection of songs that don't all sound alike. MDM have a wave like experimental sound that reminds me of something between Live & the Killers, but without the musical excess of either, with heart-felt lyrics crooned out by tenor Mike Biscotti, with the occasional wah-wah distorted guitar solo thrown in over odd changes that could come from a Bowie album or an instrumental context might be mistaken for a Skid Row tune. I could easily see this band performing on MTV. They fit perfectly as one of the current saviors of popular music. 

No comments:

Post a Comment