As my friend Ray recently said about Lemmy of Motörhead, some things do seem to “get better with age.” In this particular case, by “better” I mean “more creepy.” For most sexagenarian musicians, this would be a horrible fate. For Alice Cooper, it may just be what he has been working towards for all of these years. Off-stage, he’s known as an avid golfer, a restaurateur, an actor and even a fan of The Simpsons but under the spotlight, Cooper’s...
At some point, goth culture – as in, eye-liner, heavy foundation, the glory of The Smiths and maintaining a general state of very outspoken malaise – wears a bit thin as fans age and gets comical for those on the outside looking in when they see the caricature of “aging darkness” that the average aged gothic music fan becomes. Needless to say, bands must grow with their audience in this particular subculture or risk the same indignant fate. This fact...
Over the last couple of years, it has become fashionable for a band to inflate its sound to out-sized proportions using strings, an army of side musicians, studio trickery – whatever – and present listeners with a lumbering and over-ambitious monster that thy affectionately call a “defining document.” More often than not though, all a band that attempts such an endeavor might prove is that their ambition can get the best of them; whatever they came up with might be...
I'm just going get this out of the way right now. Yes, I voluntarily went and saw Pink at the HP Pavilion, and yes, she was nothing short of absolutely fabulous. Now that that's off my chest, let's continue… As I was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic between San Francisco and San Jose while listening to the latest Marduk record, the inner metal-head in me was starting to wonder what I may have gotten myself into. As we all know by...
I'm just going get this out of the way right now. Yes, I voluntarily went and saw Pink at the HP Pavilion, and yes, she was nothing short of absolutely fabulous. Now that that's off my chest, let's continue… As I was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic between San Francisco and San Jose while listening to the latest Marduk record, the inner metal-head in me was starting to wonder what I may have gotten myself into. As we all know by...
Not that I would ever even think to compare him to a glass of wine (a fifth of Jack Daniels is much more appropriate) but at sixty three years old, Lemmy only seems to get better with age. And while Motörhead has not once disappointed me in the dozen or so times I've seen them over the years, this show was by far my favorite. To see a band on top of its game after so many years was pretty...
At this point, someone needs to ask: “What happened to Matt Good ten years ago?” Since Beautiful Midnight came out in 1999, the singer has abandoned any semblance of the unhinged, seething and manic voice that was the calling card of songs like “Hello, Time Bomb,” “Everything Is Automatic” and (to a lesser degree) “Apparitions” in favor of embarking upon an extended examination of love lost, hard feelings, isolation, lonesome nights and stark naked introspection to be completed at an...
At the end of every break-up, there is always that moment when, finally sick of drowning his sorrows, crying into his beer and generally feeling sorry for himself, a man – every man – will start trying desperately to find something to laugh about (even if it's bitterly self-deprecating laughter) and try to inhabit a moment that seems to make life worth living. It's always a boozy truth, but it's also an important one because it signals that the healing...
How does one pick up the pieces and try to put them back together after tragedy strikes? Such is the question every band has to ask itself when they find themselves short a member but, particularly when that band loses its voice, it can be a devastating blow because it instantly throws any future that the band members left behind might have into question because it's impossible not to notice the difference in any future recordings they might make. It's...
Those long-familiar with The Flaming Lips can (and will – at length) happily admonish the uninitiated masses with tales of the band's ongoing quest to integrate space rock seamlessly into the pop idiom but, at this point in their career, while the band has been wildly successful on a cult level, they've only occasionally brushed the outer-most quadrants of pop super-stardom on the most superficial (and some would say ironic) of levels; even as their sound has gotten progressively larger,...