It’s 6 a.m. and there’s no one in the building. The morning begins just as the night has ended, in a dark cloud of self-doubt and heartbreak. Reeking of stale smoke and even staler beer, I wind through a dim labyrinth of hallways and cubicles. Still reeling from the night’s…
Shelton Williams was just another face in another crowd, an anonymous punk with safety pins in his clothes — and, occasionally, his skin — playing in unknown bands with names like Buzzkill and worse. He was onstage from the time he was 15, yet rarely at the front, usually playing…
How can you dislike a guy whose past albums have self-deprecating titles like Poet, Fool or Bum and Lee Hazlewoodism: The Cause and Its Cure? And how can you pass up an album dedicated to “pimps, whores, pushers, dopers, gangsters and the bottom of the human chain shit-heels”? You can’t,…
The debut record from Jucifer worms its way into the coldest of cynical hearts by starting out full throttle and then coasting to a close. There is a long downward trajectory in aggression from beginning to end; by the time the record is finished, the band has referenced a handful…
As we bitterly curse the fact that the apocalypse skipped over us, at least there’s some new music to commiserate with. Make a statement against pointless existence and spend your rent money on these new releases. There’s lots of jazz to choose from, plus a few bluegrass and folk offerings…
Johnny Dilks strides into DeMarco’s 23 Club hurriedly, wearing a dusty pair of overalls. He’s here to see a man about a horse. See, Dilks is a country singer, DeMarco’s is a Bay Area honky-tonk and Dilks’ friend Leonard Iniguez has a horse named Hobby who’s willing to be photographed…
Bands may come and bands may go, but as long as the Muffs are still around and making music, Los Angeles rock can’t be half as bad as people say it is. Vocalist-guitarist Kim Shattuck and bassist Ronnie Barnett (with, at one time or another, drummers Criss Crass, Jim Laspesa…
The Melvins, legendary innovators of brutal intelli-sludge heavy rock, like to challenge their audience as much as their drum heads and amplifier outputs. As vocalist and guitarist Buzz Osborne says, the band’s modus operandi is to “screw with people. That’s what I like.” Speaking from his Los Angeles home, Osborne…
Is it too late to revise all those best-of-’99 lists? Surely anyone with two ears, a brain and a heart will slide this to the top if made aware of its compelling, and tantalizingly mysterious, tableaux of primary colors and thatched shadings. Papa M’s quasi-“debut” appeared in the bins without…
Even if someone had collected all the necessary statistical data to compile An Encyclopedia of Athlete Spousal Abuse Cases, it would hardly seem fair to confine these violations to one vocation. By the same token, is it fair to “Death” that it be restricted to such a trivial profession as…
If any of these milk-hued heroes like Kid Rock, Eminem, Limp Bizkit or Korn had real balls, they’d tell the Grammy Awards to fuck off. They’d gurgle 5.8 percent beer guzzled from cans and slur fizzy dialogue like “fuck Ricky Martin and Whitney Houston and the Backstreet shits” while appalled…
Bourbonitis Blues, Alejandro Escovedo’s sixth and latest solo album, is the culmination of a life spent growing up in public. It wasn’t an easy growth — his path has been pockmarked with deaths, births and changes in musical styles to match — but between the album’s swelling strings, ebullient country…
Alternative rock and golf are somewhat of an unlikely pairing. Sure, Alice Cooper plays golf, but he’s old enough to be considered Marilyn Manson’s grandfather. And yeah, mainstream people like Hootie and the Blowfish, Huey Lewis and Celine Dion play, but do they really count as musicians? Musicians aren’t generally…
An album that defies easy dissection on most levels, Illyah Kuryahkin’s sophomore effort is also one of the more adventurous and sonically mesmerizing of the year. Dean Wilson (a.k.a. one-man band I.K.) first surfaced in ’96 with Count No Count, a kind of No Wave take on Guided by Voices’…
Not enough people heard the Pernice Brothers’ here’s-where-the-strings-come-in debut, 1998’s Overcome by Happiness, a record full of big melodies and tiny sentiments. And you can bet that in a year, the same will apply to Chappaquiddick Skyline, because both records never fly high enough to land on anyone’s radar. On…
One of the worst things about listening to Led Zeppelin was the munchies. Sure, “When the Levee Breaks” sounded just as good stoned as sober, but being sober was for sports or science class. And listening to Zep was what you did when you wanted to forget about form tackling…
For most people, music is a very personal matter. Songs, albums and artists carry a significant and significantly different meaning for each of us. That’s especially true with music critics. While we do get to reveal a little bit about our passions and taste through our writing, polls like annual…
There’s a reason the black leather jacket and the pompadour continue to stand as calling cards among lovers of ’50s rock ‘n’ roll. After all, they were two of the more disturbing fashion statements to parents whose kids were forsaking Pat Boone for Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry…
You Go-Go Girl! (Varese Sarabande) She may not have invented pop music. But because her pop’s surname just happened to be Sinatra, this minimally talented nepomaniac certainly exploited the genre for all it’s worth. “She” is Nancy Sinatra, she of the much-celebrated “laughing face” and less-lauded lousy pipes. Both are…
The Seventh Deadly Sin (Coroner Records/Atomic Pop) You’ll learn more about the seven deadly sins watching Gilligan’s Island than listening to Ice-T’s latest sloth-ass mess. Consider this: Each episode of G’s follies features a gluttonous Skipper who gobbles everything in sight, a short-fused Thurston Howell III who blows his wrathful…
Don’t know how Y2K is panning out for you so far, but I suspect there are plenty of people already trying to separate themselves from everything pre-millennium. Who could blame them for furiously pursuing new things? After reading all those “best of the century” lists, perhaps even you might consider…
Having being driven to the brink of insanity by computer problems, and considering there will be about 10 Arizona bands playing SxSW today, we’re going to switch tactics. twitter.com/martincizmar I’ll post pics, mini reviews and the like from SxSW this week, then probably use the account as an annoying self-marketing tool…
