Editorial Reviews Music Review:
Music Review
Bernadette Speach: Reflections
Breakdance Battle [Enhanced] [Import]
Breakfast in America [Original recording remastered]
Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt [Import]
Amazon.com
San Francisco's Stroke 9 took a worrying three years to follow up its major-label debut, Nasty Little Thoughts. But the band sounds thoroughly unaffected on the follow-up. Rip It Off is bristling with delirious rock riffs, whopping hooks, and the same tongue-in-cheek attitude that propelled their last hit, "Little Black Backpack," onto the modern-rock charts. Balancing the self-effacing humor of Blink-182 with the earnestness of Counting Crows, the band blazes through easily digestible fare like "Kick Some Ass" ("I wanna kick some ass, but I'm really just a sensitive artist") and "We Were Wrong" ("For me you were so wrong / I'd only come over to get it on") as if bent on dethroning hometown arena-rock champs Third Eye Blind. --Aidin Vaziri