Bloggerhythms

Keith Roberts and The Young Dubliners offer a slick, polished, and commercial Irish-rock sound that befits their home base of Los Angeles. Their style is a complete contrast to bands such as Black 47 who flaunt their grittier New York City street image. While Larry Kirwan's band, along with The Saw Doctors, U2, and the Pogues, wear their shamrocks on their sleeves the Dubliners roots are a little more subdued. Roberts makes it known the Dubliners have other things on their minds. The fact that The Dubliners are more commercial than any of the bands mentioned above is given away by the arena rock sound of the title track as well as "Touch The Sky," and "Say It's So." There are no politics on this album, no songs about rebellion, and nary a word that would upset a conservative. "Please" is a love song that could be a hit on commercial FM radio and "Evermore," is a song about the singer's little girl, a subject that normally makes me cr...

Last year around this time, WXPN, 88.5 FM, Philadelphia, broadcasting from the University of Pennsylvania, asked listeners to vote for their ten favorite songs of all time. WXPN tabulated the votes and then played all 885 songs finishing with number one. For those of you curious about the results here are WXPN’s 885 Greatest Songs Of All Time . This year XPN is trumping that programming feat by asking everyone to vote for their ten favorite albums to compile the 885 Greatest Albums Of All Time . After long and careful thought, and with deep apologies to many great albums that didn’t make the cut, here is my list. In order to keep the list diversified, and to prevent it from getting top heavy with too many of the same artists, I forced myself to follow one rule: No artist could appear on the Top 10 more than once. So while this isn’t a true top 10, it will have to do. 1. The Beatles - Abbey Road (1969) The three part “Golden Slumbers” suite closing out the album gave this one...