Over the last fifteen years, Chicago’s The Sea and Cake have cemented themselves as one of the most innovative, talented and ambitious groups ever to grace our eardrums. With their unique style of pop and arrangement, stemming all the way back to Nassau and The Biz, they’ve always been slightly to the left or right of where everyone else was sitting, molding style, form and intellect into albums that don’t ever get old. Despite their incredibly overoccupied schedules—Sam Prekop and...

Leave it to a writer to know exactly how to get the attention of other writers. As a whole, the members of the press corps tend to be a fairly predictable lot; there typically tends not to be a single one that won’t get a twisted little smirk at a dick or fart joke, few don’t have significant problems with authority figures and they’re always on the lookout for something that might be construed as controversial to pitch at their...

This is the album which made me a committed David Bowie fan.  I bought my first copy, a bootleg, in a little record store in Mexico City in the summer of 1974. I was exploring the city, and stumbled into this record store with a box of bootlegs on the counter. As this was the first time I had encountered bootleg records, I had to buy one. I selected the Bowie because I had just seen him two months before....

Rushing home from the airport after flying in from a business trip from Albuquerque, my focus had been getting back to my wife and our newborn so I could see him before he went down for the night. With that accomplished I flashed back to the plane ride into LAX where I spent time decompressing from my business meetings by scanning the impressive catalogue of material Old 97’s have amassed in their 15-year history, wondering how tonight’s set list would...

People generally seem to have a pretty strong reaction to Ted Nugent, and judging by the mustache and mullet-sporting crowd who were hoisting their Bud Lights and blurting out their battle cries of "Nuuuge!" well before Uncle Ted even hit the stage, the show at The Fillmore was going to be no exception. As he stormed the stage and proceeded to launch into an absolutely blistering rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” I knew it was going to be one...

For the second album in a row, notoriously road shy David Berman is taking his Silver Jews on tour. In support of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, the Joos will undertake a six week road trip across the face of this great nation, and will probably find some characters to lovingly paint into the next Silver Jews album, hypothetically due in 2011. Fellow Drag City-ites Monotonix—who Berman discovered while touring in Israel—will open on select dates. Get your fix while they...

For the second album in a row, notoriously road shy David Berman is taking his Silver Jews on tour. In support of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, the Joos will undertake a six week road trip across the face of this great nation, and will probably find some characters to lovingly paint into the next Silver Jews album, hypothetically due in 2011. Fellow Drag City-ites...

In rare cases does the core concern of an artist have the chance to be poured out in one of their music videos. An artist will most likely do it at an award ceremony, leaving us with an awkward moment rather then their intent, a social statement that has a chance to change opinions. Lucky for us we have Moby to do it right. His humbleness leaves us with an awesome thought, a minimalistic approach and great view to change...

San Francisco has definitely had its fair share of "once in a lifetime" type shows over the years. And from Metallica on stage with Mercyful Fate at The Stone to a "surprise" Nine Inch Nails gig at The Oasis, or an epic Mentors New Year's Eve show, I've been lucky enough to witness more than a few performances that most people never got the opportunity to see, simply because they never happened anywhere else. As I look back on all...

It’s funny how history mutates as events unfold. In 1988, for example, Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff landed like an atomic bomb on record store shelves (to put perspective on the analogy, Nirvana's Nevermind did hit bigger a few years later—not unlike how a hydrogen bomb would) and college radio airwaves and forcing an epiphany in listeners at the same time. Granted, no one has ever intimated that the band invented grunge but, in those embryonic years, they were the genre’s first...