A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the …And Out Come The Wolves (5 x 7” vinyl set) by Rancid. It sounds a little sensationalist to make this declaration but, of the albums which really sparked the punk revival of the 1990s (including – but certainly not limited to – Punk In Drublic by NOFX, Stranger Than Fiction by Bad Religion, Dookie by Green Day and Smash by the Offspring), it was Rancid who ran closest and truest to...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Dreams From The Factory Floor LP by Louise Distras. The problem with a lot of what is earnestly being marketed as punk rock in the twenty-first century is that much of it is fundamentally flawed: it’s made the way it is because that’s what’s expected.The expectation is that punk songs will come equipped with a confrontational attitude stacked on top of a progression of between three and five chords, and somewhere...

NEEDS s/t (File Under: Music) It’s funny how, while the sound of an album might not seem particularly interesting upon a listener’s first exposure to it, it’s possible for something to spontaneously change, shift the focus of the music ever-so-slightly and suddenly make it totally captivating.Such a thing happened for me the first time I heard NEEDS’ self-titled debut; when I put it on, I was less than thrilled to discover that almost none of the usual trappings which qualify...