CrossFade: The Dueling Album Review Show

For this year’s Give to the Max Day, MinnMax supporters raised more than $65,000 for Emerge Mothers Academy, a nonprofit supporting Twin Cities single moms. Along with the great feeling of supporting a worthy cause with their charitable donation, Nikolai (TechBeatNik) also unlocked an episode of CrossFade about “ undun ,” the 2011 record by Philly R&B/hip-hop group The Roots! It was a lot of f...

Surprise! It’s a special episode of CrossFade, thanks to a generous member of the MinnMax community. On Give to the Max Day, the MinnMax community raised more than $57,000 to help foster kids in Minneapolis. One of the many appealing donation rewards was an episode of CrossFade where the donor got to choose the album we talked about! Chris Fayter (a.k.a. Crayter) chose “Portal Of I,” the debut alb...

CrossFade is taking a break! We haven’t picked a return date yet, but Matt and Jason have ideas about how to make it even better going forward. We decided to end this season on a high note by bringing back the CrossFade Community Shuffle. It’s an episode where dozens of our Patreon supporters send us their current favorite songs, we shuffle a bunch of them, and we listen to and talk about them liv...

Neil Young’s had quite a career. A hugely influential solo career, his work with CSNY, that thing during The Last Waltz, and now you can’t even hear his music on the biggest music streaming platform on Earth. Wow! To finally crack the nut on Neil, Matt brought in writer and fellow Neil Young fanatic Tyler Wilcox for an in-depth discussion on two essential Neil records: Citizen Kane Jr. Blues 1974...

Was rap already everywhere by the time you were old enough to choose what you wanted to listen to? If so, then it might be hard to imagine how important a show like Yo! MTV Raps was for the genre and for the music industry as a whole. It only ran for seven years, but in that time, it had an indelible impact on the kinds of music people were exposed to. In this episode, Matt (who was around for the...

We’ve talked a lot about the Duluth-based indie rock band Low on this show, because Matt knows them well and Jason’s never heard them. In the wake of co-founder/drummer/vocalist Mimi Parker’s death in early November 2022, we wanted to dedicate an episode to a short retrospective on the group and Mimi’s contributions to it. If you know Low, we hope this is a faithful look back at the group’s impact...

This episode of CrossFade (The BossFade?) featuring writer, podcaster, and music journalist Natalie Marlin ( https://twitter.com/NataliesNotInIt/ ) is devoted to rock icon Bruce Springsteen and ‘90s indies Archers of Loaf! Matt and Natalie chat a lot about the kinds of stories Bruce tells through his music and what makes his mild corniness endearing, as well as why Archers Of Loaf’s sound cut thro...

Like the bodacious ‘dos from which the sound gets its name, “hair metal” can be a hard genre to pin down! Luckily, we’ve got writer/podcaster/critic/organizer and hair metal fan Elana Levin to run through two genre classics to help set some things straight! Matt and Elana cover Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” (the one with “Pour Some Sugar On Me” on it) and “Long Cold Winter” by Cinderella (one of the ba...

Pharoah Sanders (not “Pharaoh”) was a disciple of John Coltrane and a pioneer in his own right, putting spiritual jazz on the map with unique, genre-blending textures. You can’t truly encapsulate an artist like Pharoah Sanders in a few songs, but on this episode, we pay our respects to the legend with seven songs that we think exemplify some of the broad strokes in artist’s sonic palette. We’d lov...

“When I say ‘I like everything,’ I really, really like everything.” So says Tariq Ravelomanana ( https://twitter.com/infinitykniives ), who creates music under the name Infinity Knives. He means it, too: He gets inspiration from everywhere: folk, country, experimental, grunge, pop, hip-hop, prog, rap. That idealist eclecticism comes through in his own music, including his 2022 record, King Cobra,...

Hoy! For a special treat, Jason gathered Kyle and Sarah (aka the other pieces of the Triforce) for a roundtable adventure through the soundtrack to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. You can listen to it wherever you get podcasts – and in a CrossFade first, you can watch the whole discussion on YouTube at the link below! Watch this discussion on YouTube: https://youtu.be/iTiQ_7FG-OY Special than...

We recently uncovered our old iPods. We haven’t really used them for several years, so we thought it’d be a lot of fun to hit “shuffle” and see which of the tens of thousands of songs on them came up first. Then we discussed each of them on mic! We’re proud of some and cringing at a few others. It’s a real time capsule, kind of a snapshot of who we were back then! Also, what we cared enough to dow...

This week on CrossFade, it’s all about the 𝓋𝒾𝒷𝑒𝓈 – which makes it a great episode for writer, critic, and podcast host Bijan Stephen’s debut! Uyama Hiroto was a close friend and collaborator with Nujabes (known best for his Samurai Champloo soundtrack and being an influential artist in the jazz/hip-hop space), and it shows in “freeform jazz,” his 2017 record featuring a lot of chill instrumental w...

It’s a proggy, skanky episode of CrossFade with writer, editor, and podcaster John Carson ( https://twitter.com/John_Carson )! In this episode, we’re just barely scratching the surface of ska with John’s pick, Streetlight Manifesto’s “Everything Goes Numb”. Then we chart new territory with Nolan Potter’s “Music Is Dead,” one of Matt’s favorite albums to listen to on vinyl. Both are new to the othe...

What music did you listen to when you were 5 years old? How did it impact the music you listen to or the way you approach it? Do you still listen to any of it today? In this chooglin’ episode of CrossFade, Matt and Jason take a suggestion from the community (thanks MinnMax supporter podbod!) and go back to some of the first music we can remember loving: The Doobie Brothers and Creedence Clearwater...

We’re thrilled to welcome Cody Matthew Johnson, known for his music and sound work on games like Trek to Yomi, Devil May Cry 5, Guardians of the Galaxy, Resident Evil 2 Remake, and many more, to compare and contrast Bon Iver with Iron Maiden! Dare you to find another show that brings together two things THAT different. We talk with Cody about how Bon Iver’s approach to music didn’t change for “22,...

What does perfection mean to you? What if you knew someone ELSE called something “perfect”? That’s what we wanted to find out on this episode of CrossFade, so we looked at two of the dozen albums that have received a perfect 10 score from Pitchfork, the music publication everybody famously agrees with and enjoys without reservation. Wilco’s breakthrough “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” and Amon Tobin’s brea...

2022 is almost halfway over! To mark the occasion, Matt and Jason picked their favorite records released this year for this special discussion. Jason picked Soul Glo’s “Diaspora Problems” (March 25) because it’s high-energy, it bends genres, and crams a lot of righteous fury into its lyrics. Matt’s loved the work of Benny the Butcher for a long time, so his latest release, “Tana Talk 4” (March 10)...

Content warning: This episode contains discussions of sensitive topics like depression, sexual abuse, and suicide as explored in the music of The Mountain Goats and Silver Jews. MinnMax Contributor and all-around gentleman Joe Juba brought an album by one of his favorite artists to CrossFade! This episode might be the most we’ve ever delved into lyrics. The Mountain Goats’ “Heretic Pride” and Silv...

What would make you buy digital music in 2022? Is it respect? Curiosity? Guilt? Little bit of all of the above? That’s what we wanted to know from each other – and why we took a dive into each other’s growing collections to interrogate each other’s music tastes! Matt and Jason each picked five songs from the other’s Bandcamp collection to talk about, poke fun at, or marvel at a new favorite we nev...

It’s a mid-aughts extravaganza on CrossFade, featuring writer, critic, connoisseur and musician Erin Margaret Day ( https://twitter.com/comeawaywithEMD )! Between English indie rockers Electrelane and SF experimental rock group Erase Errata , get ready for rock, noise, ambience, and more rock! With Erin, we break down the radical roots of these bands and the kind of music they play, what Electrela...

However big a left turn this is for you, you should know it’s also pretty wild for us, too. On this episode, Matt and Jason turn the dial to “POPULAR” for a look into the top 20 songs on the Billboard Top 200! We discuss which songs work for us, which don’t, and how the streaming age has made it very, VERY easy to ignore what’s on the radio. From Justin Bieber to Dua Lipa, from Future to Ed Sheera...

Note: This episode was recorded and published before claims of misconduct against Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler were made public on Aug. 27, 2022. AJ Moser is the biggest Arcade Fire fan we know, and in this episode of CrossFade, he got to make the case for “Funeral” being one of the greatest indie rock records of the 21st century. Matt returned the favor with the esteemed, accessible Built to S...

Okay so this one’s not a duel, but it’s still a hell of an album! For this special episode, we asked the CrossFade community to vote on albums they wanted to hear us discuss. It was a tight race (sorry, Frightened Rabbit ☹) but the vox populi won out when they voted for The Strokes’ breakthrough 2001 record, “Is This It”! Listen as Matt (very smart about music) and Jason (never listened to this al...

Season 2 is here and so is everyone’s favorite guy on the internet, Dan Ryckert! It seems like “Chinese Democracy” is nobody’s favorite Guns N’ Roses album. It took a huge amount of money and time to make and then it underperformed when it DID come out – so why did Dan pick it? And what made Matt finally break out Alice Cooper’s “Love It to Death”? Find out in this fun episode! Follow Dan on Twitt...