If Conquistadork brings even a few hundred new fans Phil Keeling’s way, then it will be an album well worth the time and effort that clearly went into its conception and release. What makes Keeling’s style of comedy, and by extension this album, such an easy hour to kill over and over again (the album clocks in at just under an hour) is how it comes across in hysterical, well-timed bits like “I Have a Crush On Cyclops” or “Cheeseburgers and Porn.” 

I was saddened to find recently that a monstrous, completely free, seemingly endless archive of Bruce Springsteen concerts had been taken off the internet. We won’t debate the morality of listening to concerts a person would be otherwise unable to enjoy. It was a resource available to those who wanted it, and it provided an extraordinary chronological history of one of the most enduring figures in rock history. At twenty-six years old, my options for experiencing shows from the 1975 tour are pretty slim. Any opportunity to experience these shows or others from Springsteen’s considerable career was a welcome one.

Bruce Springsteen and The E-Street Band’s performance at the 2012 Grammy’s was a good plug for the group’s seventeenth studio album, Wrecking Ball, but it wasn’t great.  If you were to go on that performance alone, you might be inclined to think that Springsteen and the gang have finally settled, as they approach forty years since the release of 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. That the days of crafting something as ferocious as Darkness on the Edge of Town or as solemn and devastating as Nebraska were behind them.