Remember the first time you heard The Cure or Depeche Mode? It was awesome, wasn't it? The tremendous impact those moments had could have been for any number of reasons – maybe you were unhappy, or maybe you were sick of New Wave seeming to represent the totality of pop at that moment and wanted something which soundd a little more human, or maybe it was because Robert Smith's guitar parts or Dve Gahan's melancholy melodiesjust felt right and had...
Listening to Harrington Saints' new album serves an excellent remainder of how blanched and watered down boot boy street punk has become over he last ten years. Bands like Rancid, Dropkick Murphys and Street Dogs all used to have some punch in their music – a little fight, a little outsider aggression and a little skinhead swing in their streetwise sloganeering – but they've gotten a little soft, pudgy and comfortable over time and have lost some of their stuff....
Everyone's heard the horror stories about up-and-coming bands playing under-populated shows (books like Our Band Could Be Your Life are full of them), but how many people can actually say they went to a concert where no one else showed up? One would assume that moments like that are difficult for a band to take, and Louisville, KY-based hardcore quintet Xerxes proved it certainly isn't easy when they stepped on stage at The Shops at Parts & Labour in Toronto...
Push them hard enough, and every musician will begrudgingly admit that it's possible to call forward potent, powerful and provocative emotional states on command. That's not an easy thing to admit because listeners need that kayfabe to be believable; fans want to believe that the laughter, tears, hopes, fears, aggression and everything else that an artist represents is something that – at east in an abstract way – fans could find within themselves and relate to, and so connect with....
I received this CD eagerly, but also nervously. I have loved Garbage ever since their first, groundbreaking CD, and I’ve been disappointed by them ever since their second one. That first album set the bar so high they haven’t been able to completely clear it since. In fact, it could be said that their first album invented the bar. Garbage had created something new then – studio electronics crossed with hard rock, pop songwriting married to a punk sneer. It...
While he doesn't come right out and say it in conversation (he doesn't seem the type), Hot Water Music bassist Jason Black is finding it difficult to hide his excitement. For the first time eight years, Hot Water Music is back on track with a new record label behind them (Rise Records) and a new album, Exister; the band's first offering of new music since they put out The New What Next in 2004. That's part of what has the...
For Iceland’s Of Monsters And Men, there was a very small amount of time between winning a battle of the bands competition (Iceland’s Músiktilraunir) and capturing international attention. First formed in 2010 as a duo between Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and Ragnar “Raggi” Þórhallsson, the band had expanded to include four other members and produced a number one hit in their home country within a year. That hit, “Little Talks,” became the lead single on the Reykjavík...
After thirteen years of uniformly mixed media coverage, it can only be said that some listeners and critics have just always been confused by Gossip. When the band first burned out of Olympia. WA in 1999, critics couldn't decide how long this dirty shirt rock n' soul trio who owed as much to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion as it did to Sleater-Kinney was going to hold together because it just seemed like a great indie rock gimmick at the...
For over fifteen years now, Godsmack has been experimenting with new and innovative ways of telling people to go the hell away. “Get Up, Get Out,” “Keep Away,” “I Stand Alone”… and if you don’t heed their warning, be ready to face the consequences. Just ask Nikki Sixx, also known as the inspiration for “Cryin’ Like a Bitch.” They’ve got more ways to say “Beat It” than Michael Jackson could’ve ever dreamed of, if he had not spent all his...
For over fifteen years now, Godsmack has been experimenting with new and innovative ways of telling people to go the hell away. “Get Up, Get Out,” “Keep Away,” “I Stand Alone”… and if you don’t heed their warning, be ready to face the consequences. Just ask Nikki Sixx, also known as the inspiration for “Cryin’ Like a Bitch.” They’ve got more ways to say “Beat It” than Michael Jackson could’ve ever dreamed of, if he had not spent all his...