Murry Hammond kicked off the evening by sauntering out on stage proclaiming, "Welcome to a very special evening with the Old 97's, which is English for I open up for our lead singer," drawing laughs from the crowd. He proceeded to regale the crowd with personal songs and stories about his life including his opening ditty about "a teenage hardcore punk kid who used to ride the rails filming graffiti on box cars." He also sliced into a very heartfelt...

After hanging around the Kevin Says Stage for an hour or so, I decided it was probably time to get over to the Main Stage and see what was happening over on the other side of the Pier. After making my way through the sea of kids and stopping off at the...

Want to see someone pretend they are starring in an iPod commercial in a live setting?* C'mon, you know you do…it's on your list of things to do before Halloween rolls around and you have to pull out the snow boots and ugly sweaters, right? Well, that's a distinct possibility now that Brooklyn's Chairlift have announced a spate of tour dates for August-October. Starting off at All Points West on August first, Chairlift will hit the road for the last...

The excitement is palpable in the New York apartment where Patience Hodgson – lead singer for The Grates – is temporarily residing. Currently in North America to do a short string of appearances at festivals and one-off shows in Canada and the United States (including Hillside Festival in Guelph, Ontario and Monolith Music Festival in Morrison, Colorado), Hodgson recently whispered the announcement that, four months ago, The Grates began writing songs for another album that they hope to begin recording...

You dirty, dirty boys. You started with four, grew to eight, cut down to three, and now go by the name of Scratch Perverts. The three of you, Tony Vegas, Prime Cuts and Plus One, must put in a lot of work when you go through almost forty songs in an hour and twenty minutes. The album, Beatdown, is an obliteration of sound and shredded vinyl captured for us all to hear in the same fashion that Rodney King’s beat-down...

"Your names aren't on the guest list. Sorry." I'm supposed to talk to Thurston Moore, and quite honestly, I felt like I was in over my head even before this particular neutron bomb exploded. The box office attendant at Philadelphia's Electric Factory just gives me a shrug. "Are you sure?” I ask him. “I'm supposed to do an interview with the band." I remembered that I'm supposed to talk to a guy named Dan Mapp who's Sonic Youth's manager, and...

How is it that The Dead Weather has come to be regarded as “Jack White's new project?” Granted, there's no arguing that White is an important element in the band (he gets co-writing credit on seven of Horehound's eleven songs) but he is the drummer in The Dead Weather – a position that seldom if ever affords the sole creative custody of a band. Did anyone refer to Eyes Adrift as “Bud Gough's new band” in 2002? Does anyone other...

While it can be easy to side-step the recognition of common themes or repetitive behavior in human actions, the longer a set maneuvers reoccur, the harder it gets to ignore until finally one must either recognize the comedy of the repetition or risk being dismissed as oblivious. That's the point Billy Talent is at now – when they began their musical chronology six years ago (with their self-titled album and major label debut), they made the biggest of big impressions...

This is part one of a three-part series on the 2009 Vans Warped Tour. Parts two and three are coming soon. After a totally stellar experience at last year's tour stop in San Francisco, to say that I was stoked about covering this year's installment of the Vans Warped Tour would be a gross understatement. Now in its fifteenth year, the tour has blossomed into something way beyond a Punk Rock Festival, and this year's line up is by far...

It's been a very, very long time since the heart and soul of Motown got any play or even a fraction of the respect it's due. Recently, the closest that anyone comes is some know-it-all pop tart or producer playing taxidermist with the genre and adding ample amounts of paint, irony and embalming fluid to it, thus making the new music a sad parody of greatness. Because nature abhors a vacuum (not unlike the one in the aforementioned atrophied shell),...