Given the intense fetishism we Americans apply to the early ’90s grunge era, it’s nothing short of stupefying that the hard-rock subgenre’s punk/noize forebears have all but vanished in terms of systematic overhauls and resurrections of the once-significant back catalogues. Sonic Youth and the Birthday Party come to mind among…
Listening to Shipping News is a bit like getting into a drunken car accident: You’re not entirely sure what just happened, but you’re almost certain you don’t want it to happen again. The band’s songs favor length: Their average duration is about six minutes, during which guitar parts clock in…
In author Richie Unterberger’s estimation, no other decade produced as much great music as the ’60s. Of the many overlooked geniuses of that era, the author has chosen 19 to profile in his latest book, Urban Spacemen and Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators and Eccentric Visionaries of ’60s Rock. And all…
Putting out compilations is one of the more dubious conventions of the recording industry, just a notch above the time-honored practice of getting first-time artists to sign away 98 percent of their royalty rights. “Best Of” collections often involve little more than slapping the most obvious hits from a dying…
“What the hell was the name of that band?” Nine Volt singer-songwriter Andy Mitchell is stumped. Sitting in a booth at downtown’s Chez Nous lounge with drummer Andy Mendoza and bassist Stevie Flores, the three are desperately trying to recall the name of the national group they recently opened up…
He blames it on the caffeine-free Pepsi, though that probably has nothing to do with it, as vile as a beverage labeled both “caffeine-free” and “Pepsi” might be. Likely, it occurs because although it’s a “lovely, sunny day” in Duluth, Minnesota, he is stuck inside on the phone, talking to…
Damn, Gumbo didn’t know jazz had died until he watched the Ken Burns series Jazz. Killer history you handed over, guy, but thanks so much for making the music smell like embalming fluid to millions of jazz virgins. Jesus, you could have stuck Mozart in there somewhere and no one…
Crawling from the aural and psychic wreckage of Brian Jonestown Massacre a couple of years ago, guitarist Bobby Hecksher (who’s also worked with Beck) blinked his eyes a few times, massaged his bruised limbs, and promptly got back on the horse. This time, though, one of his own device, christened…
Without an ounce of embarrassment, the author states that he spent the first 22 years of his life in semi-rural West Virginia. Not even stints in Virginia Beach, Toronto, D.C., and the Valley of the Sun have been able to shake the formative detritus of that era. It’s hard, God…
The line winding around the auditorium at UC-Irvine is a snapshot of all-inclusive hip-hop culture: Asian girls shuffle forward on dictionary-thick platforms; Jell-O-haired white punks with lip piercings scam for tickets; and black couples in leather and braids hold smoky sticks of incense. The large crowd of fans for tonight’s…
Nick Tosches, the distinguished writer and biographer of Dean Martin and Jerry Lee Lewis, once remarked, “I think Elvis Presley will never be solved.” For those who’ve stared at the sideburned sphinx for nearly half a century, folding, unfolding and refolding him like the steel in a magical sword, Elvis…
We find ourselves in a moonlit English graveyard, in front of an ancient set of chained doors set into a dilapidated mausoleum, behind which we can detect a slow, stentorian breathing — can you hear it? That labored huffing of an angry thing trapped inside, left to mark out its…
As a longtime follower and frequent champion of antipodal sounds (and having written extensively about the lands down under from the mid-’80s through the early ’90s), your humble scribe must confess to being rather nonplussed in regard to New Zealand bands of the past half-decade or so. It’s easy enough…
Oh, what to do when you’re non-black, non-urban and non-oppressed, and yet yearn for entree into the cool-kids clique of hip-hop? Vanilla Ice and Kid Rock decided to just lie about their histories; Everlast claimed being Irish American made him a minority; Eminem played up his white trash mom and…
This will come as a shock to all you earnest local entrepreneurs and so-called scene boosters who have released, or are planning to release, a multi-band compilation, but no one gives a shit about another crummy regional sampler. Aside from, of course, that big-haired metal chick who pestered you to…
John Cale’s first solo album, released two years after his bitter break with the Velvet Underground, was something of a shock for those who remembered his final contributions to the band on White Light/White Heat. Vintage Violence, sporting a cover showing Cale staring impassively from behind an opaque mask, was…
Does the world need yet another live Neil Young album? If your response lingers upon shuddering memories of Frampton Comes Alive!, then vacates into the realm of Pearl Jam-does-25-live-CDs abject boredom, you’re probably reading the wrong review. For Young, among all contemporary performers still extant (the Dead don’t count, despite…
When Kurt Cobain’s mother, Wendy O’Connor, cried to the Associated Press, “I told him not to join that stupid club,” she wasn’t talking about Columbia House. She was referring to the exclusive rock-stars-dead-at-27 fraternity. But membership has its privileges. If you’re one of those die-young elite who lament over a…
When the idea was first hatched, no one could’ve imagined that this week’s Scotti-Stock concert — a local music extravaganza to benefit Piersons/Beat Angels bassist Scott Moore, who was involved in a near-fatal traffic accident last October — would have taken on such a profound meaning. Relying heavily on the…
The problem isn’t what to say about Ireland’s remarkable Chieftains, it’s where to begin. And, as Paddy Moloney might say, when in doubt, one simply begins at the beginning. In 1963, piper Moloney, late of the traditionalist folk group Ceoltóiri Cualann, recruited a band of fellow musicians in order to…
On January 10, last Wednesday as I write this, MTV premièred a 90-minute made-for-television movie titled Anatomy of a Hate Crime, based on the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a famous case you might remember. Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man who attended the University of Wyoming at Laramie, was beaten…
The thing about Rush fans — Hello! I know you’re out there, I can hear you breathing through your mouths! Is this thing on? — is that, by definition, they missed the boat, victims of a pop-culture-induced inferiority complex. Y’see, Rush, forming in Toronto circa ’69 by Gary Lee Weinrib,…
