Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil, Gillian McCain Having done my fair share of biography readings I have come to appreciate the oral history format more and more as the years go by. It just took a book like Please Kill Me to make me realize what a fun and thorough and effective experience it can be. I like to think of myself as a punk, but since it’s a badge of honor in...

Artist: Rascal Flatts Album: The Greatest Gift Of All Label: Big Machine Records/Sony Music What do people mean when they say “that music moved me”? Moved you from your seat to turn it up? Moved you from the room to get away from the twisted sounds of crashing and banging? Moved you to shake your bottom and get a groove on? For me, music is a background noise that is always on when I am working, cleaning, playing, cooking, bathing...

WHO: Jeff Rosenstock WHAT: WORRY. WHY: It’s just about official: Jeff Rosenstock holds the title as the most relevant punk artist active today. What at first seems like your standard batch of punk songs, upon closer inspection reveal to be nuanced, complex, and absolutely unpredictable. Rosenstock is basically taking pop punk to the next level and is dragging us with him while wearing his heart on his sleeve. Unbelievably, his latest album WORRY is by far his most compelling release,...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Ready Take One LP by Erroll Garner. What do critics really know about jazz? Such was the first question I found myself asking as I wound my way through Popmatters and Jazzwax looking at longer-lead reviews of Ready Take One. Complaints about Martha Glaser’s production styling and the looseness of pianist Erroll Garner’s performances were commonplace, but that really strengthened my resolve to listen closely; any number of things could have...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Record Store Day release of The Real Royal Albert Hall Concert 1966 2LP by Bob Dylan. It’s incredible how personally fans of folk music took the form in the 1960s. Back then, any new development or movement away from classicism was seen as abhorrent and rejected wholesale by purists. Of course, taking such a rigid stance was akin to inviting some upstart to come along and upset it and, in 1966,...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Record Store Day Exclusive Release pressing of Alice In Chains’ Live Facelift 12” EP. While readers may be familiar with parts of Alice In Chains’ new Black Friday/Record Store Day release, Live Facelift, it’s nearly guaranteed that they don’t know the whole thing. They may know some of the songs – like the performance of “It Ain’t Like That” because it was the song which was playing in the background as...

The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection Restored Edition (Blu Ray) I’ve always said I’m late to the game. And as a fan of comedy, one can never be more late to the game than getting into the Marx Brothers now. Oh, of course I’ve known who they are because I’ve been a Warner Bros cartoon fan ever since I was a kid. Those cartoons were full of Groucho cameos and appearances. But it’s only a couple years ago that I...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the “Christmas In Hollis” 12″ Picture Disc single coming out on Black Friday 2016 from Run-D.M.C. I must confess that I have never been a fan of Christmas carols and Christmas songs. While I understand the idea of having a song in one’s heart around the holiday season, I’ve always thought that the idea of professional musicians recording albums of the same standards with their own small creative stamp on them pretty...

Mitch Hedberg The Complete Collection One of the great perks of listening to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast is all the stories you get to hear about Mitch Hedberg. He was unique, absurd, kind, generous, and apparently quite the stud (Janeane Garofalo freaked out when she found out Mitch had a crush on her). It’s fun to hear these stories, because after all these years, I don’t think we’re quite satisfied with the answers we’ve uncovered in the mystery that was...

Artist: David Bowie Album: Legacy (2CD) Label: Columbia/Legacy/Sony Music Over the last forty years, there have been a multitude of “Best of David Bowie” compilations to his new release racks. To date, this critic counts eleven good, sturdy ones, but the methodology for making them has always been the same: “ensure that the core of around ten classic tracks which appeared on ChangesOneBowie (the first Bowie hits comp) are present, then mix and match a list of singles which flow...