Have you been craving new sounds in your ears? Have you been wondering if you should give your hard earned money to iTunes for some new music? Hell, have you been wondering if you should spend five minutes of your precious life to download new music for free?  We at Safe As Toast would like to help. Thus, we humbly present to you a new ongoing feature…

The Opinions of Middle-Aged Men: Album Reviews

The Black Keys, “Turn Blue” (2014)
I heard this album at some point.

Pink Floyd, “The Endless River” (2014)
OK.

Lana Del Ray, “Ultraviolence” (2014)
The artist-listener dynamic is transactional more or less like this: You don’t give a shit, I don’t give a shit.

U2, “Songs of Innocence” (2014)
“Every Breaking Wave” achieves no mean feat: The comfort of the familiar coupled with the shock of the new. A surge of feeling and truth crests on “Every Breaking Wave.” Helluva song, “Every Breaking Wave.”

Black Sabbath, “13” (2013)
< The first five Black Sabbath Albums
= “Sabotage,” “The Mob Rules,” and that one with the baby devil cover they did with the guy from Deep Purple
> “Technical Ecstasy,” “Never Say Die!,” albums with Dio that aren’t “Mob Rules,” the other ones (?)

Courtney Barnett, “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit” (2015)
Damn, girl.

Savages, “Silence Yourself” (2013)
Goddamn.

AC/DC, “Rock or Bust” (2014)
Can’t do it. Won’t do it.

Death Cab For Cutie, “Kintsugi” (2015)                                                                                          I like this more than I expected, and I have trouble articulating precisely why. Something about the attention to little details most listeners never consciously process.

Royal Blood, “Royal Blood” (2014) and Death From Above 1979, “The Physical World” (2014)                                                                                                                                                      If Queens Of The Stone Age reproduced and created two, hard-rocking, two-piece bands, then Royal Blood would be the sibling who prefers weed, and Death From Above 1979 would be the sibling who prefers cocaine.

Flying Lotus, “You’re Dead” (2014)                                                                                          What the fuck?!

The Bad Plus, “The Rite Of Spring” (2014)                                                                                The Bad Plus are better than your favorite band. Stravinsky agrees.

Aphex Twin, “Syro” (2014)                                                                                                         Aphex Twin rules, and should do an album with The Bad Plus (who have covered Aphex Twin). Stravinsky agrees.

The Decemberists, “What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World” (2015)             Yeah, about half of it.

(Opinions by Scott and Bevan. Photo by Bevan.)