Ah, Christmas time. It's a magical time of year when the hearts of children light up in excitement at the possibility of receiving gifts from Santa. It's a magical time of year when the hearts (and pants) of teenagers swell at the thought of spending their first holiday with that special someone. It's a magical time of year when college students remember that they should have gone more regularly to class, because even acing some exams will not save them...

Jason Bonham brought his Led Zeppelin Experience to the Warfield Theater late last month, and proved that although it's been thirty years since the passing of John Bonham, his music still runs deep in his sons blood, and that this may be the closest those too young to have seen the mighty Zeppelin live will ever get. While the show was a touching tribute from son to father, but it was also a tribute to the generations of Led Zeppelin...

It might sound unwarranted or unfair given the staggering amount of attention that the band has received since “Sex On Fire” blew up two years ago, but who really likes Kings Of Leon? I mean seriously – this is a band that got its' start churning out half-baked and partially-lobotomized, cast-off grunge-isms (remember “Molly's Chambers” or any of Youth And Young Manhood in general?) only to be reborn in 2008 as a bunch of wildly overwrought, country-fried indie rockers and,...

Hey there junkie, Sorry I'm a day late. I hope you hadn't started twitchin' or something, but I got held up outta town. I went down to Atlantic City for a little R&R an' to see what there is to see down'ere – I ain't never been before. It was sorta cool, but it's an uptight town; if you go there, you hafta be on yer best behavior, or they'll mess you up big time! That's actually parta why I...

If you haven’t heard of The Drums, then you’re probably not an avid reader of New Music Express, Cliché Magazine, Clash magazine or Rolling Stone, where they have been lauded for their sound, even garnering the unabashed title ‘Best Hope for 2010’ by Pitchfork. You probably didn’t follow the BBC’s Sound of 2010 poll. You probably don’t reside in Brooklyn. You may have, in fact, been living under a rock. Or at least that’s my excuse. The point is, if...

When Beck first released Odelay in 1996, it was to a very eager and excited audience and to critics just waiting to sharpen their claws. The success of “Loser” earned the singer an advance critical chorus of “probable one–hit wonder” and, given the deluge of small–potatoes albums released between Mellow Gold and Odelay , such...

What's in a name? As fashionable as it might be to say that such qualifying measures are meaningless or useless when it comes to the arts, musicians live and die with generic names and their perceived status in pop culture. Think about it – how many new buzz words crop up per year/per month/per week to define the sound of the new “it” band? How do people view it on the basis of that nomenclature after its' fanfare has waned?...

When A Perfect Circle announced that they would be playing three nights in San Francisco, and playing a different album in it's entirety each night, I was a bit torn as to what show I wanted to attend. In the end I chose the third and final night, where the band would be playing eMOTIVe, their album of cover songs. Knowing that they had not really played these songs live before, I was a bit curious to see how they...

Alright junky, si'down a minute an' listen up, So I thought I was doin' good by ya. I thought, y'know, thirty new bits o' liberated music a week? That ain't bad right? 'At's what I thought, an' prolly whatchu thought. It was a good deal, but then the holidays started hittin' and the gates swung open; what I'm findin' now makes what came before look like a drop in the bucket or like I was holdin' out on you! I...

Trying to measure the influence of The Lowest Of The Low and their debut album, Shakespeare My Butt, on modern rock is impossible. That isn't any kind of overstatement – when the album dropped in 1991, an entire generation of Canadians (and those Americans living close enough to the border that they picked up Canadian radio stations) heard it because the album managed to penetrate several schools of sensibility at once; for some, the band's smart-assed (and shockingly literate), punk...