Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Silversun Pickups

[#] Swoon (2009)

Release what's brewing underneath.

Reviewed September 10, 2023

I take the haziness of the earliest Pickups work to be a sort of sonic naivete—the Pickups before success as a band was even vaguely a consideration, off in their own world segregated from the larger L.A. music scene, let alone the world. With the focus on riffage, effected but not drowsy, Swoon sounds like an escalation. Silversun recorded this one after a world tour that turned them into strangers back home, and you can hear the alienation in the music. That's not to say Silversun get confessional or anything—but compared to Carnavas, this is a much sharper block of moody rock pieces that sprawl less and slam harder.

Silversun really explore the dark, overwhelmed confines of heavy pop rock on this one. There's a small orchestra that cradles the edges of the softer tracks and provides an urgent, cinematic pulse behind the band on others. The drone that Swoon exhibits is more fuzz than delay, like the thick rumble on the phenomenal closer "Surrounded" or the appropriately-named "Draining". "Substitution" steps off the fuzz entirely, and the sonic meltdown on "Panic Switch" (giving the band their second wind at radio) layers three solos to chaotic effect. This album is a nervous breakdown in musical form, and with the quality so high, Silversun proves they are one of the finest bands the 2000s gave us—and no, they really don't sound like the Pumpkins.