Listen to enough music, and eventually the lines between novelty, shtick, fallacy and fanaticism begin to get a bit blurry. As record labels worry evermore about their bottom lines and market shares and attempt to compensate by releasing more material than the other guys, the possibility for genuine tripe getting more attention than it deserves becomes increasingly real. How could it not? When every concept of a band is getting unloaded, there's bound to be a couple dogs in the...

Some things never go out of style after they first come in. If one looks at The Dixie Chicks, for example, it's possible to notice that each successive release since  the band's breakthrough Shouldn't a Told You That in 1993 has been rapturously received and even side projects like Courtyard Hounds have done well. Likewise, while the performers' names and faces may change, girlie pop acts have been doing well since the advent of pop music as (in this writer's...

Having just released their seventh studio album,  punk rock legends Social Distortion returned to the Bay Area for the first time in almost two years to play back to back sold out shows at San Francisco's Warfield Theater earlier this month and proved they are still a force to be reckoned with.

 Opening the show with “Road Zombie,” the guitar driven instrumental on the just released Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, it quickly became apparent that Mike Ness meant business....

It's funny how time has a dehumanizing effect on the stories that people tell. Eventually a given story starts to develop a layer of gloss like shellac as it is told and then re-told by a multitude of sources; the nuance and details get glazed over, characters become idealized commodities and the story becomes a product. In the act of telling a story, characters and events become inflated, are made two-dimensional and robbed of their humanity. Even the story of...

Awright junky, So here we go, dancin' the time warp again. Here's me – yer ever-lovin' Don Loder –  carryin' a great big bag o' SWAG, an' 'ere's you – startin' to feel the itch. Ya gonna try an' take me fer what I got 'ere junky? I betchu won't, but I'll give ya a taste anyway. In'ere, I got a set o' thirty-one pieces o' solid gold SWAG – some of it from some great names like Katy Perry,...

While Twisted Sister has since gone on to really only be remembered for a handful of singles (“I Wanna Rock” and “We're Not Gonna Take It,” most notably) and singer Dee Snider's shockingly articulate, “dark horse makes good” performance (alongside John Denver) at the PMRC censorship hearings of 1985, there was a time when the band rode incredibly high on a series of hit records and singles. Twisted Sister's caustic blend of Noo Yawk punk, glam rock and metal was...

Not many bands can say that they're able to simultaneously utilize a set of sounds that their fans will recognize and appreciate while also restructuring that sound into something new and different, but Mogwai is able to make such a claim. Since first appearing in 1997, Mogwai has had the luxury of crossing generic boundaries with impunity as they try out different sounds and ideas at their whim, and are only ever met with acceptance from both fans and critics....

Being seventeen years old was fun, wasn’t it? It's a brilliant time for most; the light at the end of the tunnel that was high school was becoming visible, long drives on errands still seem like fun and hope was beginning to emerge on that whole acne front. Like most kids, I spent my time playing Halo and listening to an inordinate amount of Bob Dylan. But while all of us were fragging virtual aliens and digging up records, Ryan...

Let England Shake is one strange beauty, not unlike P.J. Harvey herself. A musical chameleon of the highest order, she’s David Bowie with scarier eyebrows and a less defined codpiece, changing sound and vision from listening station to listening station. On her eighth solo full-length, Harvey inhabits her most unsettling character yet: the demure ingénue with revolution on her mind.  Almost all of Let England Shake is sung in an infantile coo that gives creepy credence to what amounts to...

One look at a map of Canada tells the story of just how sorrowful a lot the province of Manitoba has been handed in life. From a national character standpoint, Manitoba is regularly forgotten; it is regularly forced to play straight man for the clowns to the left of it (the prairie provinces and British Columbia) and the jokers to its' right (Ontario, Quebec and The Maritimes) and, were that not enough, the province STILL doesn't get much opportunity to...