It is with great sadness that we confirm that musician, rapper, activist and director Adam "MCA" Yauch, founding member of Beastie Boys and also of the Milarepa Foundation that produced the Tibetan Freedom Concert benefits, and film production and distribution company Oscilloscope Laboratories, passed away in his native New York City this morning after a near-three-year battle with cancer. He was 47 years old. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Yauch taught himself to play bass in high school, forming a band for his...

Of all the things that The Real McKenzies will own up to being, the one that they will cop to first and most happily is that they are a Canadian band; it is who the been since forming in Vancouver, BC in 1992, it was who they were when American audiences became aware of the band in the mid-Nineties and it is the calling card that the band has dropped as they've toured the world. The Real McKenzies are as...

Awright, fall in ya worthless junkies an' thieves,How ya keepin' out'ere, ya SWAG-gers (a new nickname fer you junkies? I'm tryin' it out)? How's life where you are? Gettin' a little shaky mebbe?Well, guess what? I gotcher cure right'ere! I big bag o' new SWAG thit'll cure all yer ills. No bullshit, le's get inta it. Dis week, I took a coupla artists ta da cleaners, an' got some prino stuff fer you too. Like, I nabbed jus' a ton...

Marilyn Manson, the man who still makes my mother shudder in disgust well over a decade after she was first subjected to the nightmare-ish visuals of the video for “The Beautiful People,” is back in the saddle and has just released his eighth full length album under the title Born Villain. After a run of mediocre releases and a lack of “shocking” material spanning almost a decade, it seems most of those horrified mothers have more or less shaken off...

Anyone who paid attention to a new Pennywise album over the last seven years knew that something was happening within the band and, while they might not have known what the problem was, they knew it didn't sound good. The Fuse betrayed the first hints of trouble; on that album, Pennywise was beginning to show a bit of age and wear, but at least they were still trying to stir the pit a bit as songs like “Knocked Down,” “Take...

As I flipped through the endless number of TV channels on cable yesterday, I started to wonder if musicians had just thrown in the towel and called it quits. More and more, I was finding singers tied into corporate commercials and TV shows where they try to sell their single at the end. Such a gimmick isn't a bad marketing ploy I suppose, but rarely do I find anything worth my hard-earned ninety-nine cents. Does anybody else cringe when they...

It might sound bizarre given the conformist climate present in every other area of the period, but the fact is that the 1980s may have been th most creatively fertile decade in modern music history. Everything seemed to get the opportunity to blossom at the same time in the Eighties; while the dinosaurs like Starship and The Eagles were either dying off or falling apart, pop tarts like Toni Basil were striking gold with re-written flopped pop singles from the...

It's hard to know what to make of Skip The Foreplay's Epitaph debut, Nightlife. On one hand, it's hard not to laugh because, with a mix of screamo and dubstep as well as a great big dollop of pop frontloaded onto a hyper-aggressive, metallic base, the Montreal-based band seems intent on presenting themselves as a tarted up and feminized caricature of metal. Metalheads would have every right to sneer at that but, on the other hand, the band presents that...

Why is it that every time a profitable market trend hits the music business, a few old, totally inappropriate hands shoot in the air to announce, “Me too!” Over the last few years (three or four) the trend has been to reissue the back catalogues of established acts with fresh and new digital remastering treatments applied to spruce up the music. This trend has proven to be rewarding in a few cases; as the vaults have been pillaged (see the...

I was perfectly satisfied when Killing Joke released Absolute Dissent in 2010. Actually, I was grateful for the triumphant return of such a seminal band after their nearly thirty-year absence. Okay, let’s face it, I would feel fortunate to experience only half of their eight or so albums from 1980-1989. I never imagined that I would be able to enjoy a new chapter of Killing Joke and that it would be as good as it was. To be able to...