This year’s edition of the Vans Warped Tour features one of the most diverse lineups in the festival’s seventeen-year history. One of the most unique bands included on the tour is the Cincinnati, Ohio-based experimental rock outfit known as Foxy Shazam. Prior to performing a wildly flamboyant set on the West Coast leg of the tour, bassist Daisy and backup vocalist Alex Nauth spoke with Ground Control about their inaugural run with Warped and the plans that they're already developing...
At this point – fourteen years after the original lineup came together in Palm Desert, CA – Queens Of The Stone Age has become an institution. The band itself may laugh at that image and possibility (who would believe that the world at large follows and enthuses over the movements of a bunch of “old transvestites” anyway?), but it's true; in the last fourteen years, QOTSA has amassed a mythos which includes getting matching tattoos to commemorate the worst show...
The recent swell of interest in “Americana” music has proven to be a really interesting and exciting development within the context of pop music because it has signaled a shift in values. Once again, the vacuous nature of the North American Top 40 pop tart has fallen from favor, and interest in well-written songs has returned renewed as bands including The Avett Brothers, The Felice Brothers, Mumford & Sons and Dawes have all broken through. That trend is heartening, but...
The last few years have been both good and strange for Matt Good. Since the release of Avalanche in 2003, the singer's manner has seemed to cool off and become more reflective; no longer hissing about “turning shit into solid gold” through clenched teeth, Good has seemed to start looking outward, if only to catalogue the inequities the singer sees within himself and the desperate unhappiness in him has been reflected in his music. It has been a humbling experience...
Over the last few years, Motorhead singer/bassist Lemmy Kilmister has seemed to have held a vested interest in playing against his image as a black leather-clad, snarling, hard-rocking beast and showing a lighter, campier and loveable side. Making cameo appearances in videos for Danko Jones (in Full Of Regret – alongside Elijah Wood and Selma Blair no less), Airbourne (in the video for “Runnin' Wild”) and as the limo driver in Foo Fighters' “White Limo” video all went a surprisingly...
Arightcha bum-rushin', no account junkies,Yeahyeahyeah, I know I'm late gettin' you yer fix, but I was laid up. Some junkie jumped me inna alley down on Avenue B witta knife an' laid me up fer a coupla days. Mangy bastid won' be doin' 'at again, 'at's fer sure. Anyway, here we go again – the prick nicked me an' I ain't sure ya deserve it (you junkies – you all stick together), but I got a decent little bag o'...
Now twelve years after breaking away from Thrush Hermit and striking out on his own, there's no arguing that Joel Plaskett has established himself as one of the best songwriters in Canada. Since 1999, the singer has successfully managed to translate the small wonders in life (small towns, small town kicks, small town girls, small town bars and the love, loss and leaving of all four) into rock music capable of filling concert theaters in big cities across Canada. The...
Easthampton, MA – The Chicago rock band Wilco release their eighth studio album – The Whole Love – on September 27 through their newly launched dBpm Records. It follows the band’s 2009 Grammy-nominated Wilco (The Album) and was recorded at the band’s Chicago recording studio The Loft. The Whole Love features twelve new original tunes and is produced by Jeff Tweedy with Patrick Sansone and Tom Schick. The Whole Love is a veritable sonic stew, showcasing Wilco’s far-reaching musical prowess (multiple...
It's been a while (about ten years – give or take) since trance-y, ambient electronic music and trip hop really commanded much of a presence in the mainstream (the late greats of the explosion that happened in the Nineties included Propellerheads, Sneaker Pimps and Portishead), but that doesn't mean the music just spontaneously evaporated. No, all that music and most of those aforementioned artists simply retreated back to the dance caves from which they matriculated, continued to learn and develop...
Last Sunday night, Brooklyn’s North Side Music Festival featured an appearance by YACHT at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Blog readers were out in droves, as the nautically acronym-ed group from my beloved Pacific Northwest did their best to look and feel like a local act. It's funny seeing a band from Portland, Oregon in Brooklyn’s most infamously hipster-ified neighborhood. It's like eating a crepe at a Montreal themed restaurant in France (literally an import, not theoretically). This novelty didn’t...