Evan Lucy

Panic! At The Disco Vices & Virtues When Ryan Ross and Jon Walker jettisoned Panic! At The Disco in July 2009, a question mark would have been an appropriate addition to the band’s punctuation-accented moniker. After all, Ross had been the group’s driving creative force and primary songwriter since their inception, placing the pressure squarely […]

Forever The Sickest Kids Forever The Sickest Kids When Forever The Sickest Kids released The Weekend: Friday in 2009, they planned to follow the mini LP with two companion pieces, appropriately titled The Weekend: Saturday and The Weekend: Sunday. The group quickly abandoned this path after Friday sank under the weight of its kitschy, clumsy […]

Mêlée The Masquerade There’s a fine line between inspiration and imitation, and Mêlée’s third full-length does more than just toe the line—the album runs clear over it with little regard for the ultimate outcome. Culling their hooks and song textures straight from the Killers’ playbook, the band have filled The Masquerade with new-wave synths, shimmering […]

Valencia Dancing With A Ghost   Valencia might have been a one-and-done major-label band, but that’s not to say their time on Columbia Records was a complete failure. We All Need A Reason To Believe, the group’s lone release for the label, was a textbook example of everything contemporary pop-punk should be: hooky and memorable, […]

A Cursive Memory Let Love In A Cursive Memory wear their influences proudly pinned to their pop-rock chests. On their second full-length, the band bounce between new-era emo (“The Year”), Boys Like Girls-esque pop (“Fall Away”) and solemn, piano-heavy balladry (“Dream Away”), and musically, they’re proficient enough to do each sound well. But there’s little […]

The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus The Hell Or High Water EP The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus’ first independent release in more than a half-decade is for the haters: Ronnie Winter laments love/hate relationships on “Casting The First Stone,” which races out of the gates with a double-time drumbeat and galloping guitars as Winter tries a relatively new […]

The Secret Handshake Night & Day “I’m feeling something changing deep inside me,” Luis Dubuc sings on “Stop!” one of the highlight cuts on the Secret Handshake’s fourth studio album. Up until this point, Dubuc had built his name on a techno-infused dance-pop sound that heavily relied on pulsating synths, dancey overtones and some seriously […]

The Spill Canvas Formalities Let’s clear something up: Formalities is not an album. Sure, with 11 tracks and a near-40-minute running time, it seems to meet all the requirements, but a closer look reveals that only two songs (“As Long As It Takes” and “The Bone”) haven’t already been released. Instead, the majority of the […]

Danger Radio Nothing’s Gonna Hold Us Down Danger Radio’s Doghouse debut suffers from an identity crisis: Over the course of the disc’s seven tracks, the Washington-based quintet split their time between funk-tinged pop-rock—reminiscent of My Favorite Highway and the Rocket Summer—and unabashedly electronic dance numbers. The songs closely aligned to the former category (“Build It […]