CrossFade: The Dueling Album Review Show

Eddie Van Halen was it: the guitarist who helped drag hard rock into the pop age, leaving contemporaries in both performing and composition in the dust. On the occasion of his passing in October 2020, we’re joined by Greg Renoff ( https://twitter.com/gregrenoff ), author of “Van Halen Rising: How a Southern California Backyard Party Band Saved Heavy Metal” and “Ted Templeman: A Platinum Producer's...

On this episode of CrossFade, we’re joined by Ana Diaz (@pokachee), host of Refreshed, for a little refreshment of our own: She reintroduces Matt to Frank Ocean's 2016 opus “Blonde” and Matt returns the R&B favor with Minneapolis-born trio We Are KING’s self-titled from the same year. We discuss Frank Ocean’s penchant for ‘universally personal’ storytelling, We Are KING’s lush songwriting and...

The producer has become the product! Jason hops in the guest seat for a lesson in shreddin’ with Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” while Matt sinks into Lucy Dacus’s introspective “Historian”. It’s one of the more out-of-whack pairings we’ve heard on CrossFade, but it’s worth it to learn what you miss when you risk writing off an entire artist based on their genre. How would Metallica have been diff...

Couldn’t have planned this episode any better! With guest Emily Reese (Level With Emily, Jazz88, Scores & Pours), we ring in our show’s new name with entries from two of the most original artists of any generation: Björk’s 2017 electronic fantasy “Utopia” and Kate Bush’s untouchable “Hounds of Love”. In both, we find forward-thinking musicians at the peak of their craft with creative freedom a...

So here we are, doing everything we can… and chatting THPS music with the pros! We’re so excited to have Ralph D’Amato (producer of the Tony Hawk series through Project 8 and also a new documentary about the series) and Blake Hester (writer, musician, and THUG lover) join MinnTrax to talk about the first two Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater soundtracks, how Neversoft picked such great songs, how they were s...

One of Matt’s formative college records versus a 2020 release? Only on MinnTrax! Special guest Paul Charchian (Guillotine Leagues, Video Games Weekly, and more) almost didn’t bring Other Lives’s “For Their Love” to the table, but we’re glad he did – it’s a densely-arranged indie pop classic at only six months old (and maybe also a subliminal message about the band being a group of vampires). Yo La...

With special guest Matt Kato (formerly of Game Informer), Matt Helgeson takes a look at two women-led albums: Girl Ray’s shimmery debut “Earl Grey” and Lydia Loveless’s “Real”. With songwriting sensibilities well beyond their years, both acts seem somewhat out of time – “Earl Grey” is a 2017 record that could’ve come out fifty years earlier, while Loveless’s full country twang is tragically suited...

Mortality, humanity, and mental health struggles loom large over this episode’s MinnTrax albums: “By the Throat” from Minneapolis hip-hop duo Eyedea & Abilities and “Dark Side of the Moon” by classic English psych rockers Pink Floyd. They’re both really well-constructed albums that are fun to listen to in very different ways and for very different moods. Just how different is part of our discu...

Already a smash hit, Hamilton: An American Musical is about to explode again as it becomes widely available for the first time on Disney+ today, finding a completely new audience – including our own Matt Helgeson! Our host dives into the Broadway bash for the first time with help from Ben “Hamilton is the Greatest Work of Art of All Time” Hanson and special guest, Broadway performer/producer Alex...

Angry sophomore records take the stage in today’s episode! Guest Alex Navarro (Giant Bomb, None Above All) finds out what Matt thinks of Deftones’s “Around the Fur” – Alex’s favorite album by his favorite band – and Matt reintroduces Alex to Public Enemy’s incendiary “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back”. They’re both albums fueled by intense emotion (largely anger) though each uses it i...

With today’s episode, we wanted to express our sympathy for the family of George Floyd, repeat our solidarity with everyone speaking out against the system that murdered him, and share a song from another time that feels relevant to our own. Donate to the Help Rebuild Minneapolis GoFundMe to support North Minneapolis here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/minnmax-rebuilding-minneapolis Song: John Coltra...

In a slight tweak of the MinnTrax format this week, we’ve enlisted Jeff Green ( 1up.com , CGW, Min/Max Consulting) to commemorate the passing of Kraftwerk co-founder Florian Schneider by taking a look at two of their most iconic albums: 1974’s Autobahn and 1981’s Computer World. We discuss what Kraftwerk’s breakout must’ve sounded like to an audience conditioned on slow jams, folk, and pop hits; t...

It’s hard to overestimate the influence of Jeff Buckley on popular music, which is part of why guest Kirk Hamilton chose his 1994 album “Grace” for this episode of MinnTrax. Opting for a more recent challenge, Matt assigned Kirk to listen to “Two Hands,” the OTHER 2019 album from indie rock group Big Thief. With Kirk’s music theory knowledge and Matt’s indie rock experience, this episode’s for the...

It’s [adjective + male name] versus [adjective + male name] on this episode of MinnTrax! Mike Drucker (Nintendo, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Saturday Night Live, Bill Nye Saves the World) brings the first cassette he ever bought, Weird Al Yankovic’s “Bad Hair Day,” to Matt’s door. Matt returns the favor with Steely Dan’s “The Royal Scam,” which Matt calls “the most ‘Steely Dan’ Steely Dan reco...

On this episode, we welcome guest Kyle Hilliard (MinnMax and the Gaming Ride Home podcast) and one of his favorite albums, Blink-182’s breakout Enema of the State, to go head-to-head with Van Morrison’s cult hit Astral Weeks. Kyle’s love for Blink-182’s immature, do-what-we-want 1999 pop-punk smash contrasts sharply with the freeform folk-jazz storytelling that brought Matt to Van Morrison – and y...

Guest Bianca Ryckert of the Panning the Stream podcast joins Matt Helgeson to talk about heavy music through the lens of one of Matt’s favorite albums, Travels With Myself and Another by Future of the Left, while Matt tackles an album by one of Bianca’s favorite bands: Orchid, the 1995 debut album Swedish band Opeth! Along the way, they talk about how first impressions can mean a lot for how you r...

A rap classic meets a piece of soul history in the inaugural episode of MinnTrax! Host Matt Helgeson and guest Ben Hanson discuss the music they chose for each other – Ben chose James Brown’s 1971 live album Love, Power, Peace for Helgeson, while Helgeson chose Nas’ inimitable Illmatic for non rap-listener Ben – to see if they can find middle ground between the music they love and the music they’v...

On this introductory episode, Matt Helgeson (former host of The Game Informer Show podcast) introduces listeners to his new music review podcast on the MinnMax network alongside MinnTrax's producer Jason Dafnis. To support the podcast and leave questions and comments for future episodes, please consider supporting MinnMax on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/minnmax