No matter how you look at them, The Decemberists are a completely unique entity in the context of modern rock. Since their first appearance seven years ago, they have won fans that, when put on the spot and asked what is so endearing about the band, couldn’t tell...
The crowd was characterized by its collective hats. There was the straw cowboy, the porkpie, the fedora, the floppy knit in neutral colors that held volumes upon volumes of hair, the short-brimmed military and of course, the newsboy. The cross-section of headgear...
Especially in the last decade and a half, musicians on the East coast of Canada have been trying to shake the image that the rest of the world has of them. Not that it isn’t cultivated; if you believe the lyric sheets of the top or longest standing maritime...
What do you get when you mix members of The Clash, Big Audio Dynamite, Generation X, Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Reef? Everyone has a sound in their minds right now—no doubt about it—but, whatever you’re thinking, you’d be wrong. In point of fact...
The final date of Kate Nash’s month-long U.S. ended at historic Fillmore in San Francisco and Ground Control was there to snap off a few shots to capture this spectacular evening. Beginning her tour in Atlanta on April 15, she zigzagged her way across our great...
Ahhh the 80s…a simpler time when email, the Internet and Blackberrys were things we just saw in movies like Back to the Future and weren’t everyday necessities. This was also a time when music choices weren't as complicated—the choice was pretty...
On the list of peculiar things to define in print, Punch Brothers’ new album cross-wires the typically upbeat nature of old-timey hill music with the shadows of Southern Gothic before placing the hybrid in a high-brow concert hall context complete with...
Seventeen years ago, a global trust of disaffected youth found sanctuary in the aggressive rock of the Seventies (all genres included—hard rock, punk, metal and more) and the sounds of the early Eighties underground along with hardcore. Those with instruments...
Side projects undertaken by the members of established bands have always been funny things that, like it as not, have always been pretty easy o qualify when one looks at the players involved. The Breeders, for example, started out as a side project that afforded Pixies...
Times have changed at Epitaph Records. In the last few years, the label has seen the departure of several large-draw bands (including Pennywise, Rancid and Dropkick Murphys among others) and in their place have arrived less than punk-inclined names like Lyrics Born,...