You gotta wonder if maybe Billy Idol invested in the patenting of hair gel, since there are few who’ve done as much to bolster its sales as he has. The only time he veered from his trademark peroxide-blond spikes was in ’93, for his techno-informed Cyberpunk, and the dreadlocks that…
The art-damaged psychedelia perpetrated by the infamous Butthole Surfers is pretty much impossible to imitate. No one who’s seen the band live has ever been the same after experiencing the maddening sonic onslaught and disturbing projections. The Skivies (due at 15th Street Tavern this Friday, August 4, alongside Action Friend…
DJ Skribble (slated to appear at the Church this Thursday, August 3) began his career in the early ’90s as a member of Young Black Teenagers, a tongue-in-cheek hip-hop crew whose Top 10 hit, “Tap the Bottle,” landed it on a tour with Public Enemy and Primus. As a hip-hop…
As World Cup fever was reaching a boil, Ian Parton, the musical player-coach of Brighton, England’s Go! Team, was contacted by Nike about using one of his group’s songs in a soccer-themed television spot. He admits that the concept was pretty benign — just a montage of clips showing famous…
Last week I had the great misfortune of suffering through the first two episodes of The One: Making a Music Star, which is well on its way to becoming reality television’s Ishtar. A mutant hybrid of American Idol (natch) and Making the Band that pits eleven contenders against each other…
It’s impossible to overstate Jeremy Enigk’s influence on indie rock over the past decade. Sunny Day Real Estate, the Seattle-based quartet he fronted, was at the vanguard of the mid-’90s emo scene, inspiring countless disciples. With a sound that took the intensity of hardcore and infused it with soaring melodies,…
Mr. Lif is a throwback to a time when MCs rapped about things that mattered. So it should come as no surprise that Lif, aka Jeffrey Haynes, often cites Chuck D, Rakim and KRS-ONE as his primary influences. As commercial rap continues to devolve into something resembling the World Wrestling…
Golden Smog, a group featuring moonlighters from several rock and roots combos, has lingered for a long time, particularly by side-project standards. On Golden Smog, an amusingly sloppy EP, arrived circa 1992, with two enjoyable full-lengths following in 1995 and 1998, respectively. There’s been plenty of radio silence since then,…
Inventing punk must have been a dirty job. You had to make up new rules for the guitar, cram your hairy appendages into ladies’ pumps and lingerie, get hooked on hard drugs and squeeze Howlin’ Wolf and the Shangri-Las into the same three minutes. That routine shortened the lives of…
Compilations like Juke Joint II are the DiGiorno of mixes, culled with such impeccable taste of inspiring breadth that it sounds like your music-obsessive friend could be mixing it live in your living room. Normally, buying such mixes seems like a lazy shortcut; if the groups are good, you buy…
Contrary to popular belief, Dashboard Confessional frontman Chris Carrabba is one of the ballsiest men in music. That statement might seem absurd, considering that…well, he’s Chris Carrabba, for chrissake. But during the first part of the decade, when critics and other musicians were busy distancing themselves from emo’s fallout, the…
On Coming Up to Sunshine, Adenbrooke has melded equal parts punk attitude, alternative apathy and hardcore noise to create a sound that can best be described as post-mall rock. The six songs that make up Sunshine center on the transition from adolescence to adulthood and the confusion that brings. The…
On the de facto title track of Ten Tiers’ latest, group leader Jonathan Tiersten sings about slipping “into the comforts of drunkenness” — an appropriate phrase, given the intriguingly woozy, off-kilter tenor of the EP as a whole. The disc stumbles at times, but somehow manages to remain upright. Take…
Body Count, Murder 4 Hire (Escapi Music). Fourteen years after infuriating law enforcement by releasing “Cop Killer” — ironic, considering that Ice-T wound up playing a cop on Law and Order: SVU — Body Count is back. The musical formula is the same, but this time war, rather than the…
Few artists have ventured on as varied a path as Carla Bozulich. Emerging from Los Angeles’s post-punk scene during the ’80s, Bozulich was a member of the industrial dance act Ethyl Meatplow and, later, the more famous and rootsy Geraldine Fibbers. When the latter group disbanded in the late ’90s,…
I’ve had a bad day. Actually, this particular “Bad Day” has lasted more than five months, repeating over and over and over again, like Groundhog Day. It started back in February, when I was flying to Los Angeles on a plane that had those little TVs installed on the backs…
Yeah, I know: terrible band name. But don’t let a lousy handle prevent you from discovering Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s. This Indianapolis-based outfit is typically lumped into the folk genre — a classification that falls well short of describing the material on their latest disc, The Dust…
Yellowcard belongs to the very exclusive club of emo-leaning pop-punk bands that are named after soccer violations and feature a violinist who does on-stage backflips. Gymnastics aside, though, the presence of Sean Mackin (the Itzhak Perlman of the Warped Tour set) is hardly a gimmick; his adroit bow-handling adds buckets…
On their eponymous debut, the Futureheads played like there was no tomorrow. The four-piece threw everything it had into its recordings. The result reflected the dangers of indie mod excess: artsy punk with a clever sense of humor and elaborate four-part harmonies run amok. News and Tributes, the band’s sophomore…
Like Green Day, Rancid was once reviled as a band of poseurs by much of the punk-rock intelligentsia, but is now seen as a standard-bearer for the genre — and sheer persistence is a big reason why. Early discs such as 1993’s Rancid and 1995’s And Out Come the Wolves…
Not since the Great Split of 1972 — when the Jefferson Airplane splintered into Hot Tuna and the Jefferson Starship (and, later, just Starship) — has debate raged so passionately about the co-existing offspring of a revered band. When At the Drive-In folded its tent in 2001, it spawned two…
Outside of having a really good acid trip while listening to a bootleg, Dark Star Orchestra is about the closest thing to a Grateful Dead resurrection that most Deadheads will experience in their lifetime. In 1997, the Dark Stars began faithfully re-creating Dead shows and have been lauded for their…
