To the best of drummer Victor DeLorenzo’s recollection, when the Violent Femmes unleashed their own peculiar strain of punk-inspired folk on the Milwaukee club scene of the early ’80s, people generally thought they were “demented.” “They didn’t understand how anyone would think that other people would want to see some…
He’s one of rock ‘n’ roll’s few legends with a beat named in his honor. And the weird thing is, Bo Diddley plays guitar, not drums. But as Diddley himself has explained, “I play the guitar as if I was playing the drums.” That much is true, although most drums…
By the time they emerged from the shadow of Disneyland and L.A. punk with a tough little self-titled record on Slash, The Blasters were the quintessential early ’80s roots-rock band. They looked the part, they played the part, they lived the part. That record was as good as roots-rock got,…
Few bands have done more to embody the carefree goof-punk spirit of The Dickies than The Vandals, whether blazing their way through the holiday spirit with “Oi to the World!” or showing their sensitive side on the breakup song “My Girlfriend’s Dead.” These clowns were cranking out the mullet jokes…
The Waylon Jennings Nashville Rebel DVD (RCA) should have been included in the Nashville Rebel boxed set, where it would have added to the value of the box while benefiting from the context. As it stands, it’s every bit as entertaining as the box itself. It begins on the set…
Alice Cooper was looking to shake things up a bit at this year’s Christmas Pudding concert. So he put in a call to the three surviving members of the original Alice Cooper band, the guys who backed him on such classics as “I’m Eighteen,” “Be My Lover,” “School’s Out,” and…
Voted most likely to bring an accordion and dance-punk beats to the emo-kid table at lunch, the exquisitely dressed young men of Panic! At the Disco took their first step down the road to superstardom not by being from the same Las Vegas stomping grounds as Brandon Flowers or even…
With 1988’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Chuck D and Public Enemy positioned hip-hop as “the CNN of black culture,” raging against the machine while bringing a noise as revolutionary as it was intense. The first true hip-hop masterpiece, it placed second, behind The Ramones’…
“Just standing in front of an amp as though you’re being bathed in fuzzy volume is quite a nice feeling,” says bassist/organist Chris Ross of Australia’s latest gift to heaviosity, a stoner-rock trio from Sydney called Wolfmother. It makes him laugh to hear such seeming nonsense leave his mouth, but…
They’ve always been known for the Southwestern flavor they bring to the indie-rock table — mariachi horns, spaghetti Western ambiance, the kind of sound that says “Why, yes, in fact, we are from Tucson.” By the time they got to Garden Ruin, though, the members of Calexico were in the…
Five of the 11 tracks on Robert Plant’s first DVD, Robert Plant and the Strange Sensation (Rounder/Zoe), are new performances of old Led Zeppelin songs. But this set isn’t nearly as safe or nostalgic as the track list would suggest. Captured live in 2005 for PBS’s Soundstage, Plant and a…
Lady Sovereign may not seem as revolutionary as the last great British hip-hop export, M.I.A. In fact, at times, her record feels a bit like M.I.A. and Dizzee Rascal sitting down to tea. But it’s the pintsize rapper’s cheeky personality that ultimately matters here (although the quirky synth hooks certainly…
Despite the best efforts of several generations of right-wing extremists, it’s impossible to watch this DVD, Elvis Presley: The Ed Sullivan Shows (Image Entertainment) today and truly understand just how electrifying Elvis Presley would have seemed to the kids tuning in to Ed Sullivan’s weekly variety show in an age…
Ben Lee may be headlining the “Fun! Fun! Fun! Tour,” but the artist most likely to live up to the spirit of that tour name is Rooney, a band whose infectious self-titled debut felt like the Beach Boys bringing in Rivers Cuomo to save the day when Brian Wilson had…
Pete Townshend’s clearly playing to the school of thought that says Who’s Next is better than The Who Sell Out here. And it goes beyond the way he “re-investigates” the oscillating synth riff of “Baba O’Riley” in the first few seconds of The Who’s first album in 24 years. This…
It’s the Fourth of July at Cricket Pavilion, and kids wearing tee shirts that pledge their allegiance to every band from Anti-Flag to Less Than Jake are pressed against a makeshift stage at this year’s local Warped Tour stop to see a star their parents may, in fact, have pressed…
Few bands have made the trashy side of rock ‘n’ roll feel dirtier or more inviting than The Cramps, a psychobilly force of nature with a Ph.D. in EC comics, drive-in movies, striptease sexuality, and the fuzz-guitar genius of Nuggets. With Lux Interior channeling Elvis as the undead, G-string-wearing host…
The Rolling Stones and Alice Cooper? Can a classic rock bill even get any better than that? The Stones, of course, are still amazing live, still able to invest a song they’ve done no fewer than a billion times — from “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”…
No rock-star kid ever made a more endearing record than Sean Lennon’s 1998 debut Into the Sun, a Double Fantasy for hipsters produced by his Japanese girlfriend, Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda. Taking cues from Tropicalia, cocktail jazz and ’90s art-pop, Lennon’s lounge-adelic take on the sounds of the British Invasion…
If you followed alt. country’s flirtation with finding an audience bigger than the readership of No Depression in the ’90s, then you’ll need to own the Bloodied But Unbowed: Bloodshot Records Life in the Trenches DVD (Bloodshot), a 31-song celebration of the first 12 years of Bloodshot Records, boasting videos…
It wasn’t easy getting Ian Metzger off his ass to play some rock ‘n’ roll again. He’d burned out on the band life early, when his high school Christian rock group, Justified, turned out to be the kind of shitty life experience that leaves a person thinking, “No real good…
It’s been a while since White Pony established the Deftones as nü-metal’s answer to Radiohead, embracing moody, operatic grandeur without abandoning the muscle or the shriek. But after retreating a bit from the edge on the more conventionally heavy Deftones, they’re back to exploring their artsier side with a vengeance…
