CrossFade: The Dueling Album Review Show

It’s a new year and we’re back with more CrossFade! We hope your year’s off to a great start, and we hope you’re hungry for more fun music discussions. Our first episode with Dan Ryckert drops Friday, Feb. 11. Leave a question or song suggestion by Feb. 3 on the appropriate post at https://www.patreon.com/minnmax/posts?filters%5Btag%5D=crossfade and we’ll try to bring it up on air! We’ve got a lot...

Hello CrossFade subscribers! This is MinnMax's Ben Hanson with a one-off interruption of this wonderful feed. In honor of MinnMax's 2nd anniversary, we're celebrating "Free Week" and lifting the curtain to offer free tastes of our Patreon-exclusive content. So this is The Deepest Dive on Final Fantasy VII Remake, the first part of our gigantic community game club on our Game of the Year for 2020....

And that’s a wrap on Season 1 of CrossFade! We’ll be back with new episodes in 2022. For now, we wanted to celebrate our supporters with another Community Shuffle, where we shuffle their favorite songs and talk about what shakes out! This episode’s crop is particularly vibrant, so be sure to check it out to discover great new (or classic) music you might just love! A huge thank you to everyone who...

If at first you don't succeed, listen, listen again – welcome Tom Salta (Deathloop, Tom Clancy’s Advanced Warfighter, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, PUBG, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and many more) to CrossFade! Tom’s a big production guy, so Peter Gabriel’s tight instrumentation and arrangements on “So” make it a really pivotal album for him. “Houses of the Holy” isn’t Led Zeppelin’s most-pl...

Go inside the mind that created the music for the best-known video game about going inside people’s minds: Peter McConnell is on CrossFade! WIth Peter, we dissect the music of Ivan Tcherepnin, Peter’s late mentor and experimental/avant garde composer of the 20th century, and “Axis: Bold as Love,” the second record from The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Together, we find the little connections between H...

The gods of guesting have been kind to us once again, and Darren Korb, audio director for Supergiant Games (Hades, Bastion, Transistor, Pyre) and voice of Zagreus in Hades, has landed in our lap to talk of Beatles and Queens! Darren loves how weird, inventive, and well-produced The Beatles’ penultimate album “Abbey Road” is, and in this episode, he talks about how that blend makes him think about...

This one’s a biggie – Marty O’Donnell, composer for games like Halo, Destiny, Riven, and current audio director for Highwire Games, is on CrossFade to talk about one of the albums that convinced him to stop just playing music and start composing instead! Gentle Giant’s “Octopus” is one of Marty’s favorite records and “hugely influential” to his path as a musician and composer. If not for this albu...

Welcome musician, activist, and founder of Asian Man Records Mike Park ( https://twitter.com/mikeparkmusic ) to CrossFade! Mike’s run his own record label for 25 years, in addition to all the music he’s written and played or the anti-racism activism he’s done throughout his career. We couldn’t be more excited to have him on the show – and talking about a record he released, no less! Alkaline Trio’...

Welcome MinnMax cohort, streamer, writer, critic, and former teacher Janet Garcia ( https://twitter.com/gameonysus ) to CrossFade! Foo Fighters was one of the bands that helped Janet discover music outside of hip-hop, so “In Your Honor” holds a really important place in her heart (and her running playlist). Matt’s pick, Kendrick Lamar’s breakthrough “good kid, m. A.A.d city” is a stunningly styliz...

Jason Graves has composed for games, movies, TV (including Dead Space, Until Dawn, Tomb Raider, The Order: 1886, The Dark Pictures Anthology, and a lot more) for decades, and now he’s on CrossFade! Jason discovered Rush sometime in high school – just the right age to be listening to new, weird stuff. A drummer, he naturally gravitated toward Neil Peart’s meticulous, mathematical rhythms on “2112,”...

Lizzie Killian (FIFTYcc, chiptune rock band The Glowing Stars, formerly of Zynga, Humble Bundle, GamesRadar & more) joins this Weez-tastic episode of CrossFade! Something about “Pinkerton” caught Lizzie’s ear in high school. Maybe it was the rough production, disarmingly vulnerable lyrics, or just the solid solos – whatever it was, it quickly became one of her favorite albums ever. She even na...

Writer and performer Todd Hanson ( The Onion , Squidbillies , WTF with Marc Maron, & more) guests on this very special episode of CrossFade! Todd didn’t really get into The Beach Boys until a couple years ago, when he discovered their strange, dark album Surf’s Up , recorded in 1971 to turn around the public’s waning interest in fun-in-the-sun pop after the Summer of Love came to an official e...

CrossFade turned 1 last month and we couldn’t be more pleased with how it’s been received! To celebrate, we welcomed the guest from our very first episode back to the show: MinnMax founder Ben Hanson ( https://twitter.com/yozetty )! In a weird way, Ben’s pick (Girl Talk’s “Feed the Animals”) reminds us of CrossFade itself – unorthodox pairings that always dig up something new – but moreover, it’s...

Freehand guitarist Matt Sweeney (heard in the Red Dead Redemption 2 soundtrack, Skunk, Chavez, and more) guests on this episode of CrossFade! He picked “John, the Wolf King of L.A.,” the first solo record from The Mamas & The Papas founder John Phillips, because of its hauntingly beautiful arrangements and its dark underbelly. The discussion focuses on how such sunny-sounding music can hide su...

Composer Austin Wintory (Journey, ABZÛ, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, The Pathless, The Banner Saga, and countless other games and films) is one of the best-known names in video game music – but he didn’t know anything about music for the first ten years of his life. He brought Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ 1970 hit record “Tea for the Tillerman” to CrossFade because it reminds him of his dad, and of learning...

Chris Remo (Valve, Campo Santo, Gone Home, Firewatch, and the Idle Thumbs podcast) joins CrossFade for a discussion of “Graceland,” Paul Simon’s controversial career-boosting 1986 record, and why it took him until his 30s to finally like it. Matt gains another inductee to the cult of Blue Öyster Cult with their 1974 psych-rock “Secret Treaties,” which proves they were more than a one-hit wonder. O...

On this voice-tastic episode of CrossFade, voice actor and activist Sarah Elmaleh (Gears 5, Anthem, Gone Home, Star Wars: Squadrons, and more https://twitter.com/selmaleh ) hops in the booth with a dancy high school favorite – Beck’s funky “Midnite Vultures” – and Matt keeps things light with The Cure’s smash 1989 record, “Disintegration.” Questions from the CrossFade community include music we lo...

Gareth Coker (composer for film and games including Ori and the Blind Forest, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, ARK: Survival Evolved, Immortals Fenyx Rising, and Halo Infinite) doesn’t often get to gab about the music he listens to instead of the music he makes, which makes it such a treat to talk about why “Disappear Here,” the fourth album from British electronic group Hybrid, is one of his favori...

We’re back to the community playlist, digging through a randomly shuffled list of our MinnMax community’s favorite songs to see what shakes out! This time, the crop (including a lot of artists we’ve never even heard of!) runs the gamut from prog to rock to R&B and… whatever you call Aphex Twin (in a good way!). Thanks to everyone who left a song! Support MinnMax on Patreon: https://www.patreon...

Few artists had an impact on the landscape around them as MF DOOM had on rap. With the reveal of his passing in 2020, we felt it was the right time to finally feature the masked madman, and who better to help us commemorate him than MinnMax’s own Suriel Vazquez ( https://twitter.com/surielvazquez )? Together, we suss out what made DOOM unique, even among his peers, and why “Operation Doomsday” and...

It’s here! As a quick “thank you” you to everyone who’s listened to and supported CrossFade this year, Matt and Jason wanted to share two of their favorite songs that hold that wintertime feeling as we ring in the new year. Thanks so much for checking out our show! To jump to a particular discussion, check out the timestamps below… 9:45 - Purple Mountains - "Snow is Falling in Manhattan" 15:48 - T...

My Chemical Romance’s breakthrough “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge” and Deerhoof’s “Apple O’” don’t sound anything alike, but they both represent outsider music in their own ways. In today’s episode, Matt explains why Deerhoof tickles his earhoof and Blake tries to explain what it was like to hear MCR for the first time as a churchgoing 10-year-old. Our community also asked Matt and Blake great qu...

The MinnMax community has such interesting music tastes. Listeners send us songs for every single episode, so we thought, “Why not make a whole episode out of that?” So that’s what we did! We hit shuffle on almost a playlist of almost 100 songs(!) suggested by our supporters and came up with 18 we could fit into an episode. We ended up with such a crazy set of songs, from punk to pop to Japanese t...

John T. Drake (VP Biz Dev and Licensing for Games at Disney, fmr. PlayStation and Harmonix) joins Matt and Jason for a crazy specific episode of CrossFade! Where vocalist Travis Morrison looks inward on The Dismemberment Plan’s “ Change ,” Ziggy St--erm, David Bowie looks to the skies on “ The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars ” – but both tell their own specific stories. J...

Is it ‘90s in here or is it just me? Jeff Cork (BetterQuest, Game Informer) brings his beloved Beulah record, “When Your Heartstrings Break,” to CrossFade’s doorstep and Matt responds with The Afghan Whigs’s “Black Love.” Both albums are appropriately fueled by angst – sometimes about masculinity, sometimes about insecurity, and sometimes about the Civil War – and they’re full of incredible moment...