I was having a bad week already, when I opened the paper and saw that Ron Asheton, guitarist for the Stooges, had passed away. What could I do, except put on Funhouse and crank it up. This is my blues music. By that, I mean this is the music I turn to when I'm depressed. This is the music which makes me feel better, or at least lets me work through my feelings. Funhouse has gotten me through more depressions...

I have definite opinions of what makes a great rock concert. Take the same things that make great rock music—energy and originality—and add one more factor: spontaneity. Ideally, the band should play a different set each night, rather than just memorizing a single list of songs. Play around with how they play their songs, not just what they play. If they play an encore, it should be an honest thing, not just another programmed part of the set. And use...

Kanye West: producer, rapper, blogger, sunglasses model, and much much more. He's proven that he can conquer basically any task he sets himself. With his latest, 808s And Heartbreak, he's crossed over into music criticism; there's no more accurate and concise description of his latest album than its title. It's a record of spare beats and depressive lyrics about myriad failed relationships. It conjures a world where everyone's worst fears about love spool out over simple and impossibly catchy beats:...

After seeing In Flames deliver a short but pretty kick ass set earlier this year as part of Gigantour, I knew that when they returned to the Bay Area on their own headlining tour that I would not be missing them. And when I saw that one of my favorite new bands, Gojira, was on board the tour as a support act, I was all over it. Up first was 36 Crazyfists, a "metalcore" band hailing from Portland, Oregon. As...

Given the nature of Rivers Cuomo’s previous raid of his own vaults which yielded the first installment of Alone, fans probably had a good idea of what to expect from Alone II – another collection of embryonic Weezer songs. That isn’t what Alone II represents though; it’s a far more finessed collection than that. There are no false starts that would eventually appear on a proper studio album years later, these are ideas that were aborted by an incredibly prolific...

There are a few things that have always characterized music as rock n’ roll since the day Ike Turner committed the thrill of joyriding around in a “Rocket ‘88” to tape: a lawless disregard for authority, a few rampaging and unhinged libidinous urges, crunching distorted guitars to begin with, and all of it crowned by a singer that doesn’t care if the exertion of his performance leaves him able to speak the next day or not. In the fifty years...