In usual fashion, Billy Corgan is cranking out music and wading through a pile of projects. In addition to getting behind a wrestling promotion venture and very slowly releasing the 44 free online tracks for Teargarden by Kaleidyscope as well as putting the final touches on the album-within-an-album, Oceania (Due out in November), he is [...]
Finally! A band named after a technology I could totally use! Modest Mouse frontman, Isaac Brock, discovered some serious talent in Portland via Kentucky’s Morning Teleportation and signed them to his new Glacial Pace record label. Brock also took production duties on the band’s debut album Expanding Anyway. Their sound is frantic and eclectic. They [...]
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah blew me away with their debut album. They were able to create fun, heartfelt rock with the rhythm of Talking Heads and jangly melancholy of Modest Mouse. Their second album, Some Loud Thunder, showed signs of growth, but failed to capture some of the magic of the first. Then they [...]
The first time I shared this song with someone they said they dug it. Then asked whether this band would perform live in a dark chamber or long hallway. I answered, “dark chamber.” Apparently this was a rhetorical question. Yes “Montana” by Youth Lagoon – aka Trevor Powers – sounds very dark, but it is [...]
OK, so the Tiger Lillies aren’t exactly “party” “music.” In fact, I routinely get yelled at by present company any time a TL song comes up in rotation. I can see how one might find the shrill falsetto of Martyn Jacques a bit grating, but they are so eerie, so macabre, and so darkly funny [...]
The core of the Smashing Pumpkins was the telepathic relationship between Jimmy Chamberlin and Billy Corgan. On one hand there is a grandiose and ambitious songwriter and guitarist and on the other, a pummeling and incredibly dynamic drummer. Avalanches of howling guitar shift suddenly into waves of shimmering melody and back again. A drummer whose [...]
I was just thinking to myself, “what happened to the Beastie Boys?” Then, BAM! New album. Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2 is exactly what I needed right now. The right blend of hip and goofy, but an excellent mix and some songs that are down right nasty. “Ok” is one of my favorites on first listen. This [...]
Ol’ Merle – aka The Okie from Muskogee – is one of the last real outlaws; country musicians with true grit and balls. Merle along with Willie, Waylon, Johnny, Coe, Kristofferson, Williams (Sr., Jr., and now carried on by Tricephus), Shaver, and a handful of others defined country music as the soundtrack of the outlaw, a [...]
As a lead-up to MMJ’s new album, Circuital, they are releasing a song a week for five weeks. The first four were live tracks from their 5-night stint at Terminal 5 in NYC last October. The 5th song, out today, is a new song and title track from the forthcoming album. It’s a little too [...]
Awwww yeah. I remember when I was actually scared of Ice Cube. N.W.A was pretty successful at painting a picture of some serious hard-asses that had no tolerance for middle class white boys like myself. They were about as successful as King Diamond or Deicide was in convincing me that they had ties to the [...]
