Though somewhat overlooked over the years because of similar yet much-hyped scenes to its south — primarily in New York City and Washington, D.C. — Boston hardcore boasts a solid history of no-bullshit, no-holds-barred thrash-punk and some killer hometown heroes, including Gang Green, SSD, and Impact Unit (Mighty Mighty Bosstones…
Kinda jammy, kinda classic-rock and kinda alt-country, Steel Train has nevertheless found itself lumped in with its more age-appropriate post-punk and emo counterparts. Sure, the band’s on Drive-Thru Records and sings about, like, feelings and stuff, but it also contemplates the relationships between fathers and sons, sympathizes with alley cats,…
Vader may be the biggest-selling death-metal band ever to crawl out of Poland — and the first behind-the-Iron Curtain band to sign a Western record deal — but that’s obviously not saying much. Vader does, however, deserve some small recognition, if only for tenacity. From their 1990 demo, Morbid Reich,…
Be Your Own Pet doesn’t play punk rock like your random lipstick-wearing MTV pinups, or your pop-punk-happy jokesters, or even your serious-as-cancer anarchists. This Nashville, Tennessee, trio kicks out the raucously inebriated jams in the spirit of ’77 with style. Only a year or two removed from high school, singer…
What with all the Brian Jonestown mass o’ curs barking around MySpace these days, getting all aflutter about a new “psych-rock” band is a task. Mainly ’cause most of these swirlers make it sound like a task, twisting the reverb button to “obvious” and pretending they’re not jam bands. Enter…
Since its early days as a duet comprising Bob Weir and self-styled acoustic bassist Rob Wasserman, Ratdog has experienced its share of musical evolution and personnel shuffling. Counting late Chuck Berry pianist Johnnie Johnson and members of San Francisco’s jazz-based Charlie Hunter Trio among its alumni, the group morphed from…
To say that DJs Senbad and Pete “Supermix” Salaz have been around the block in the ‘Nix is a freakin’ understatement. Salaz just celebrated his 20th year DJing, after starting out with local legend Eddie Amador back in 1986. The self-proclaimed “house music souldier” and partner Senbad have been rocking…
The lousy CD cover to Knives in the Attic’s 5 song EP, Death Pop, does it a great disservice. Sure, the blood-spattered, knifed teddy bear doodle fits the angst/death-obsessed lyrics, but it comes off amateurish. And this is a band that should be in the midst of a bidding war,…
This furious five-piece came kicking out of Denton, Texas, five years ago as a rock-’em-sock-’em reaction to their burg’s then-burgeoning prog-emo scene (see At the Drive-In). Despite some Fugazi guitar chops similar to their Denton peers, the Gamblers’ preference was to rock out like the MC5. Endless touring and label-hopping…
If you thought that The Stills were initially lumped into the same scene as Interpol and the Walkmen because of timing rather than musical similarities, the quintet cements that notion on Without Feathers. More Radiohead than Rapture, Feathers finds the Montreal band more interested in creating expansive soundscapes than in…
Many notable artists shuffle off this mortal coil, only to endure the usual posthumous “previously unheard release” cash-in attempts. The superlative Personal File is far from that. File is a collection of voice-and-guitar-alone performances from 1973 to 1976 and the early ’80s found in storage at the House of Cash…
With a fearsome wheezing and creaking, the highly anticipated second installment of Ann Arbor, Michigan, producer Dabrye’s trilogy, Two/Three, sounds more like an infernal machine than the feel-good hit of the summer. Dabrye builds on the bleak, industrial sound scrapes of producers like the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA by adding somber…
“Thank you to members of the media for coming today. As press secretary for country-pop superstars Kenny Chesney and Carrie Underwood, I’d like to clear up two points of confusion before taking questions regarding the pair’s U.S. summer tour. First: In seeking to annul her four-month marriage to Chesney last…
Stanley Dural’s blend of styles — including (gasp!) pop — may have once raised hackles among aficionados of southwestern Louisiana accordion boogie, but it’s also an open door, for us non-purists, to the bright colors of zydeco, America’s most cheerful traditional music. Anyone who’s heard the swinging, bubbly style that…
DJ AM has built his reputation on being the DJ for anything celeb-related, so we suppose it’s appropriate that he’s the featured act at this Thursday’s Axis Hollywood. Yeah, you read that right — Axis Hollywood is what the promoters are calling Thursdays at Axis in Scottsdale (7340 East Indian…
Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell have been down the reinvention road before. Back when they were the core of British shoegazers Slowdive, the pair concluded that the noisy, swirling sound they’d helped advance was a creative dead-end and they’d better try something different. The result? 1995’s much-maligned Pygmalion, an ambient,…
You’ve gotta love the contradictory impulses at work in the title, a clever enjoining of modesty and arrogance emblematic of Sonic Youth’s attitudes and recordings for the better part of the band’s quarter-century run. Rather Ripped is a perfect name choice in literal terms relating to its content — the…
Kill Rock Stars is owned by a man named Slim Moon who has better taste in music than you do. His ears are irrefutably sharp: The KRS roster is a dense handbook on indie-underground innovators and breakthrough wonders ranging from Sleater-Kinney and Elliott Smith to The Gossip and Xiu Xiu…
Regina Spektor’s tricky tongue and fading Russian accent separate her from the ever-expanding crowd of Tori Amos/Fiona Apple wanna-bes who sport “funky” hats and own well-worn piano stools. Begin to Hope might be less histrionic than 2004’s Soviet Kitsch, but it’s still great fun to bear witness to this NYC…
Fresh off a brain aneurysm, Neil Young gives the right wing an earful, clobbering our befuddled Decider-in-Chief with a righteous bitch slap that exceeds 40 minutes. Leave it to Johnny Rotten’s favorite hippie — a Canadian with health care, no less — to hold up the mirror, cluck his tongue…
Rjyan Kidwell, a.k.a. Cex, certainly knows how to keep listeners guessing. On his first few records, he adopted a white rapper persona and came across as a wittier and less violent Eminem; he then turned on a dime, picked up a laptop, and became an intelligent dance music composer who…
The side project is an established rock phenomenon. Distanced from the bread-and-butter band, one can engage in pursuits that might not fit the profile of the mother-ship group. The late Jerry Garcia played bluegrass banjo with Old & In the Way, and The Mekons’ Jon Langford played big rock riffs…
