Since first smashing into the mainstream consciousness in 2003 with their sophomore album, Make Up The Breakdown, Hot Hot Heat has charted a surprising and unlikely course to rock stardom. Songs like “Bandages” and “No, Not Now” tread a complicated line that successfully feminized post-punk thanks to the band's ability to cross tight and succinct New Wave-y compositional themes (synths, robotic rhythms, fried lyrical repetition and singer Steve Bays' higher pitched and melodic vocals) and sublime pop savvy....

Those familiar with Johnny Cash's story know that, if one were to collect all of the material the singer released in just one year at the height of his career and released it, the results would be a staggering, multi-disc tome. Particularly in the '60s and '70s, Cash's schedule of appearances was enormous and the records which came from that period (Live In San Quentin and Live At Folsom Prison among them) went on to become not just cornerstone releases,...

Outside of Kiss and maybe The Who, no band in rock history was so perfectly able to sum up and speak to the teenaged experience as Cheap Trick was at the height of its' game. The band was able to encapsulate the sound (Kiss may always have the image locked), subject and cartoonish libido of that magic time in life when the hope of getting laid was representative of the ultimate in the human experience and the greatest sight in...

In case of music history, some terms are just synonymous. If someone were to say “punk,” and people instantly think of The Ramones or Sex Pistols first. If someone were to say “pop,” one of the first names that will come up is Michael Jackson – after all, he was the king of it. That same set of word association happens with the phrases “Jefferon Airplane” and “Fillmore.” In the Sixties, as hippies began to congregate in San Francisco, Jefferson...

As one of the few artists included in the Setlist series still writing and recording material in the present day, Willie Nelson's entry into the collection creates a very different impression from the rest. Now clean-shaven and occasionally photographed wearing tuxedos (check out the cover of American Classic), this Setlist album represents an excellent stitch in time; back to that period when Nelson's backing band was small, the songs were just North of vintage hill country (Nelson had drums –...

The terrifying thing about working in music journalism lies in those moments when sounds and styles of music you hated before you signed on start appearing again. When that happens, it suddenly seems possible that, soon, both radio and television airwaves may become inundated by those sounds again in the name of fashion. That possibility is bad, but even worse is that now, so many years later,  you may have to work with them on a daily basis. Such was...

What quality is it that might make a covers album good? They do exist (in fact, 99 Songs Of Revolution: Volume 1 is one of them), but what is it that qualifies one covers record as good and makes another bad? Is it song selection? Is it performance? Is it a combination of those things, in addition to very good timing on the band's part? A covers album is probably good because at least a little of each of those...

You have to respect a musician who, even with a potentially lucrative “hired gun” job on the go in a world-class band, still feels like he needs to express his own muse, without asking any of the all-star assistance he has access to or otherwise standing on the shoulders of his “other job” to do it; that's exactly what Chris Shiflett is doing now with his Dead Peasants and listening to the band's debut is a fantastic exercise. For those...

Since 2006, producer/musician Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton has regularly described himself as being less a producer of music and more an “auteur” and patron for music like a director is for film. He has said, “I want to create a director's role in music… I have to be in control of the project I'm doing. I can create different kinds of musical worlds, but the artist needs the desire to go into that world…. Musically, there is no one who...

It took a while (longer than anyone expected, actually) for the trends in rock to start shifting away from the guitar-pop masquerading as “indie rock” which has held the popular imagination of the record-buying public for the last couple of years, but it seems to finally be happening now, as the bands begins to go their separate ways. Both The New Pornographers and Broken Social Scene have already broken stride with their “indie rock” beginnings as both Forgiveness Rock Record...