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...

Ever been surprised by those moments when a musician takes a significant creative turn that didn't even appear to be on the horizon? It's not uncommon for fans to only be acquainted with a musician through his body of work – that's how artists are introduced to the public – so any psychological profile or assessment of musical values that listeners might develop (if that's something you're prone to doing) is based on a very outward-facing persona. In that sense,...

It's funny how things can change and evolve, and sometimes all it can take is a slightly different perspective to spur it. As a perfect example, just look at twenty-first century punk rock. Over the last few years, the genre has become so institutionalized that some quadrants of it have mutated wildly as perception in-breeds it; like when punk fused with pop and hard rock years ago, it marked the birth of emo. When punk fused with pop, hard rock,...

While Soulfly has been instrumental in seeing metal be infused with a variety of different styles since the band formed in 1997, such stylistic incorporation (including punk rock and hardcore of course, but also elements of different musics native to South America) has always been a little bittersweet for devout metalheads; for whatever reason, metal fans tend to take an 'all metal, all the time' stance to the music they like and balk at anything that doesn't fit the paradigm....

The surest way to disrupt a comfort zone is to bombard it with outside stimuli and, clearly over the last year or so, that has been precisely the plan for Mark Oliver Everett and the Eels. Following a four-year absence from recording after the release of Blinking Lights And Other Revelations, Everett broke the silence and released Hombre Lobo on June 2, 2009. Fans were in fits of ecstasy at the return and Hombre Lobo was received very well by...