If you've ever had a buzz from drinking right at the same time you're beginning to catch trails from that hit of acid that some well-meaning woman threw coyly into your mouth at a party, you know that magic midpoint between the world as everyone knows it and the one that materializes when you're utterly out of your mind. It's that moment when you seem to think more clearly than you normally do sober and the urge to quickly take...

In listening to Women + Country, the first thought that leaps to mind is, “Wow – like father, like son.” After over a decade spent breaking into pop music with the Wallflowers and then continuing along a similar path with a distinctly more 'folk' bent, Jakob Dylan has jumped ship completely from his pop ark and discovered the joys and delicacy of some old country roots, but put a different spin on them. Such a stylistic shift might remind listeners...

Since the collapse of mainstream metal happened around 1991, few bands have been more violently abused than Ratt, but there's a good reason for that: after Nirvana broke and the wheels fell off of the high times for bands like Motley Crue, Van Halen, Guns N' Roses and Ratt (among dozens of others), Ratt took four years off instead of picking its career up by its axles and continuing to run. The band has never really recovered from that mistake...

Some bands are just impossible to pigeonhole. Like, how often do you say that something sounds as aggressive and technically complex as metal but comes off feeling an awful lot like hardcore because, on a subject level, the songs are also as personal and self-reflexive as Black Flag was? And who would expect that a metal band might cover a hip hop institution like the Beastie Boys? The twain just don't meet in wither case – so what is it?...

How does one try to explain a sound that is equal parts biting self-examination and sugary pop, but laced with arena-ready rock? Rock candy? Saccharine singer-songwriter? Sweet Depression? It's hard to pick just one but, on The Army You Got, AfterpartY already has the cross nailed; throughout the album, a series of danceable beats, rock guitars and krautrock synths undulate wildly beneath the soul-searching and self-deprecating sentiments supplied by singer Kristina B. And, amazingly, it nothing collapses under its own...

Thirteen years ago, Bettie Serveert reigned supreme over the subway that runs beneath the underground. How'd they pull it off? By playing hard-to-get with both fans and the music industry at large; they only toured sporadically in any given region, they released albums on their whim and the band was generally shy with the press. In the modern music industry where image means a lot and the single easiest way to promote your new record is to say something foolish...

Ever get the feeling that you're listening to history repeat but the promise and prospect of that is wildly exciting? Listening to Brain Disaster by The Fed Pennies is like that; from the opening wobbly and scruffy but thick salvo of “Buzzing In My Head,” listeners can't help but wonder if the feeling they're beginning to get – a sort of mix of adrenaline and dismissive anger – is the same one folks got the first time they heard Superfuzz...

When hard times strike, survival breeds strange bedfellows – and it has certainly made that of the music and advertising industries lately. 'Music' and 'advertising' have always gone hand-in-hand as their business structures have made their respective marks on pop culture, but it has always been a fairly uneasy and generally conflicted alliance; one makes the music and the other makes the image, but often the bands making the music have contended that image shouldn't matter. With the exception of...

How does one gauge the growth a band undergoes between releases? Is it a matter of observing the overall quality of their work or breaking it down and looking at the smaller differences and changes that have occurred and how they factor into each song; a band's ability to stand on its' own, work beyond the conventions set forth by their genre and do so confidently? On The Flatliners' new album, listeners can check each of those different variables off...

Remember when you were a kid and, the first time you heard metal, you were really surprised because it sounded exactly nothing like what you expected? Something was a little off; either it didn't have enough of the undead and satanic cliches, or it didn't sound dirge-y enough, or any one of a thousand other things that you were expecting just weren't there? That absence would ultimately mean one of two things: either you'd write it off in disgust and...