The biggest detriment to the career of Kevin Ayers is the fact that he is still alive. If he had shrugged off this mortal coil via a combination of Dr. Robert's finest and scotch in, say, 1971, well then…we'd have another doomed visionary in which to...
In this day and age, you can’t help but be a little skeptical when a band attempts a comeback after several years. Comebacks tend to offer too much change and too little heart; too much effort in being different and too little truth in what is being projected...
I'm not really punk enough for punk shows. I mean, I've listened to punk rock in various forms since the '80s, but I just can't get my affinities right. So often do I get caught up in the fast, simple, raging music, the politics that remind me of my own...
There is something about gigantic, fuzzy riffs—riffs so big that you could land a DC-10 on them and so solid you could build the Freedom Tower on them. They make men dress in denim and tease their hair out. They make heartbreakingly beautiful girls with headbands...
Since first appearing in 1974, The Residents have followed a lonely and insular path through the underground fraught with creative dead ends and lengthy, spiraling cul-de-sacs. Initially, it was all very interesting and compellingly strange but, as time has worn on...
Of the emcees to spring from NWA around 1990, Ice Cube has been the steadfast upholder of the more theatrical side of that defunct group; releasing a series of albums that never stop issuing grand boasts and grand statements, wearing that imposing stature visibly and...
In the strictest sense, Golden Smog wasn’t really a band – not under the conventional definition of the term anyway. Everybody in the group was already in a successful band – Gary Louris and Marc Perlman had Jayhawks, Dan Murphy had Soul Asylum, Kraig...
Punk rock has been around long enough now (the actual duration and ‘first release’ title varies, but everyone can pretty much agree that the match was struck between thirty and thirty-five years ago) that the genre has had the opportunity to develop a...
After seeing as many shows as I have over the years, it’s still pretty easy to walk away and say that I had a really good time, but it’s another to experience something truly unique as I—along with 3500 Chicagoans—did on this warm Wednesday...
Sometimes a band will appear with a record that exhibits sounds considered to be haute mode at that particular moment but comes up lacking by comparison to those bands earning praise. In other words, the band in question is doing exactly the same things and they sound...