This is part one of a three-part series on the 2009 Vans Warped Tour. Parts two and three are coming soon. After a totally stellar experience at last year's tour stop in San Francisco, to say that I was stoked about covering this year's installment of the Vans Warped Tour would be a gross understatement. Now in its fifteenth year, the tour has blossomed into something way beyond a Punk Rock Festival, and this year's line up is by far...
It's been a very, very long time since the heart and soul of Motown got any play or even a fraction of the respect it's due. Recently, the closest that anyone comes is some know-it-all pop tart or producer playing taxidermist with the genre and adding ample amounts of paint, irony and embalming fluid to it, thus making the new music a sad parody of greatness. Because nature abhors a vacuum (not unlike the one in the aforementioned atrophied shell),...
For the average, jaded audiophile born and raised on a steady diet of radio and trash culture, few things are so instantly captivating than glitch music. It seems to function like static sound on the outside, but treading even slightly below the surface reveals a writhing entity trying to coalesce from a series of random snippets of code into a complex organism. Entering into a glitch album's aural landscape is like channel-surfing on six televisions at once while sitting at...
I wasn’t sure what to expect for my first session at the Roxy in Hollywood. To go to a place where some legendary people have played is always fun for me. Of course the dark-dungeonous feel of the inside, with black and white portraits of legendary artists was exactly what I was expecting. This place is on the same road as the Key Club and The Viper Room. To expect anything else would be quite a peculiar thought. LMFAO’s record...
There's something heart-warming about a home-made item. When one receives a home-made gift, most recipients tend to be doubly touched because they recognize the effort and delicacy put into the crafting; it's special because of the time and thought expenditure made by the maker to create something unique to give to someone special. Without outright saying it, the receipt of a one-of-a-kind article implies that the recipient is one-of-a-kind too. It's a very intimate exchange and an effort seldom exerted...
There's no shortage of albums in the world that, drawing from a multitude of audio sources, manufacture and present pastiche forms of song that reach in many directions at once and throw sparks at all of them, thus making them difficult to qualify. Such records (and the artists that make them) have been likened to poster-covered telephone polls erupting into song. While there is an obvious similarity in style to records like those in Apostle Of Hustle's Eats Darkness, the...
Forty years after Woodstock, the legacy of Crosby, Stills & Nash is not – and could never justifiably be – in dispute but that doesn't mean the origins and methodolgy haven't been a little obscured in the haze over the years. CSN established a new set of values within folk that made the music universally accessible to a whole new, post-Depression generation; sure – Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and about a half-dozen other poet-musicians helped out with the...
As part of the music epidemic survey group, I’m here to inform you of awesome electronic music and its influence on the youth of this world. Recently there has been a huge outbreak in Los Angeles. We had quarantine over the main area, LA Memorial Coliseum and Exposition Park. It’s been recorded that we have well over 135,000 people were within the quarantine and they were infected with the awesome electronic music. It was exposed to them though multiple hot...
How many bands can say that they started outside of the box and ignored the conventions of established rock orthodoxy but coerced a legion of fans to follow them without attempting to reach for the brass ring of success even once? The Mars Volta can. Since appearing on the popular radar six years ago, Mars Volta has done nothing but continue its course and won a significant fan base the old fashioned way: on the strength of their music, word...
Funny thing about Wilco and their luck. Ever since the band lost a member as well as the confidence of their old record label (Reprise) during the recording sessions for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot but came out on top with a whole lot of kudos for the aforementioned album, the band's fans have tried to imbue each succeeding release with the same sort of mental distress – whether genuine, deserved or actually present or not. It has reached the point now...