Just one day after the Red Hot Chili Peppers voluntarily leaked their new album, I'm With You, via a full album listening party on their web site, Tom Waits decided that it might not be such a bad idea to do it too. To that end, a news release went out this morning stating that Waits and wife Kathleen Brennan were planning to hold a "Private Listening Party" to unveil Bad As Me – Waits' first full-length album of all-new...
When William Elliott Whitmore released Animals In The Dark (the singer's ANTI– debut) two years ago, he made a remarkable impression. Songs like “Johnny Law,” “Mutiny” and “Hard Times” all drew a parallel between the hardship and will to overcome it which fueled the field music in the air in the American south during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the sense of frustration inherent to punk rock beautifully. He essentially created a new and compelling hybrid of...
It's always interesting to see what comes when a member of a really popular band splinters off to do a solo project because, almost invariably, the results are not what anyone expects. There's always conjecture about what sounds combined to make that original big group, of course, but the bets for what actually fuels an artist's engine when left to his/her own devices are almost always off; for example, Mick Jagger's focus tends to be more on R&B when he's...
Hey Junkie! Kay, so I gotta joke fo' ya: What's green, four hundrit yards long an' might make ya cry? Ya wanna know? Dis week's SWAG Report – at's what. Yeah, i's not funny, but the ream o' stuff I came by this week ain't funny either; dis week, I gotta double shot o' what I normally got – not thirty, but SEVENTY bits o' ill-gotten gains – ta… wha's Fi' dollar Billy say? “Submit fer yer approval.” There ain't...
It may have been almost a decade since last the band launched a large-scale tour but, since the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion unveiled its mammoth reissue project last year, they've fallen right back in step with old practices and taken every opportunity to remind the world what they're made of. Most recently, the band embarked on a gale-force, whirlwind tour which has found them touching down on four continents with dates in Argentina, Brazil, Germany, France, Italy and Japan in...
Awrightcha mooks, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know yer all chucklin' a little that dis is da SWAG Report 69 (hehehe… Sixty-nine!), but I ain't screwin' aroun'is week awright? A number's a number, no matta how much fun it is. Inn'ere, I got THIRTY-TWO PIECES o' primo dope fo' ya ta sample, an' some of it izz'a fines' kind. We ain't talkin' no shit 'ere, ann'ere's somethin' fer everybody, so buckle up cuzz'ere we go. This week, jus' fer you, I...
Earlier this morning, a publicity news release went out like a slug from a twelve gauge shotgun: after a decade together, Alexisonfire is disbanding. After some of the events which took place over the last few years, and with many of the band's members embarking on side projects including City and Colour, Black Lungs and Bergenfield Four, some fans and industry critics may be less than surprised at the split, but vocalist George Pettit made it official when he issued...
Everyone is getting a history lesson before we get into this record. The Calm Blue Sea is a four-piece group out of Austin, TX which originally formed back in 2007. They released a six-song album in 2008, followed by the score to Siegfried in 2009. Now, in 2011, the band has gone back to that first six-song album, completely remastered it with two extra tracks and reissued it with better distribution. There's an almost a genuinely calming effect to The...