The last twenty months have been a hectic time for the Eagles of Death Metal. Since the release of Heart On on October 21, 2008, the band has shattered all previous expectations of them by establishing themselves as an internationally celebrated touring act, broken into the Top 100 in no less than four major international markets and been featured in major advertising campaigns as well as appeared on several film...

Anyone that has ever spoken with bassist Mike Watt knows he loves what he does. Since co-founding The Minutemen with guitarist D. Boon and drummer George Hurley in 1980, Watt has seemed to eat, sleep and breathe his instrument and reveled in the fact that he gets to do for a living what some people only dream of and would love to do if only they could. Watt is the first to say that he is lucky to be able...

Sometimes album art can be remarkably of what a pop star has in store for fans, whether they know what to make of it right away or not. Christina Aguilera's new album is a perfect example of that; at first glance, the tidy but mildly unsettling image of a Christina cyborg looks like something that could have graced the cover of a hair metal band's album in the Eighties or Nineties (it reminded me a bit of the album covers...

Over the last few years, Willie Nelson has seemed to take great joy in playing against both his image and standing as one of the most venerable and celebrated living names in Country music. To name just a couple of examples, Nelson passed the dutchie and played out some Jamaican reggae rhythms for an album's length of time on Countryman in 2005, he scrubbed up and got uncharacteristically tidy in 2009 for a set of uptown contemporary covers on American...

Remember when you were a kid and the last days of August were both the greatest and most terrifying of the year? It was a unique sensation; with the daily drudgery of a new school year looming, the lackadaisical tranquility of summer is shattered by all those things that “need doing” before they get placed indefinitely on the back burner because they “need to focus on school” – or so their parents tell them. In that time, some people run...

Hey – I got somethin' special for youse, Hey there kiddies! So, like I was sayin' the last time I unloaded a truckload o' SWAG on you, I came up with somethin' a little special for this tenth edition o' the SWAG Report. It's a little different and appeals to alla you fetishists out there. Lemme tell you the story…. So I got this buddy and he's a bit of a freak. His name's Phil (you prolly don't know him,...

It has long been contended that some of the best songs ever made tell a story and that is a reasonable assertion, but the truth is that sometimes there's a little more to it than that. Sometimes what really makes a song stick with people is a combination of the images created by the lyrics and the character of the music, with some additional knowledge of the auteur; it's less tangible, but sometimes that is the truly enduring quality of...

Every now and again, an urban myth comes true and the living, breathing, panting and screaming release/reissue of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's Controversial Negro is proof of that. “Reissue?” you ask, “I thought it was a myth that this album even existed. I never saw a copy of it – and I looked – so I just assumed that someone telling me they had a copy of Controversial Negro was just the talk of an earnest, wannabe poseur.” That's...

By the time the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion even started to think about making Now I Got Worry – what would be their fourth domestically released studio album – they had already tread pretty far from their beginnings as a Pussy Galore-d, pigfuck-ed, dirty shirt rock n' roll band. JSBX' self-titled debut successfully finished out the train of thought that Spencer had started with Pussy Galore on Right Now! In 1986; Extra Width had polished up the rough edges of...

Hey there you little scavengers o' human decency, So what's goin' on? Whaddaya need this week? I'm feeling a little charitable to you because it's comin' up on summer. You know summer? Not that girl up the street that cuts her bags of China white with baking soda – not that Summer (she owes me money, that bitch) – I mean the season when school lets out and turns all o' you troublemakers loose on the world. It's a fun...