There's something heart-warming about a home-made item. When one receives a home-made gift, most recipients tend to be doubly touched because they recognize the effort and delicacy put into the crafting; it's special because of the time and thought expenditure made by the maker to create something unique to give to someone special. Without outright saying it, the receipt of a one-of-a-kind article implies that the recipient is one-of-a-kind too. It's a very intimate exchange and an effort seldom exerted...
There's no shortage of albums in the world that, drawing from a multitude of audio sources, manufacture and present pastiche forms of song that reach in many directions at once and throw sparks at all of them, thus making them difficult to qualify. Such records (and the artists that make them) have been likened to poster-covered telephone polls erupting into song. While there is an obvious similarity in style to records like those in Apostle Of Hustle's Eats Darkness, the...
Forty years after Woodstock, the legacy of Crosby, Stills & Nash is not – and could never justifiably be – in dispute but that doesn't mean the origins and methodolgy haven't been a little obscured in the haze over the years. CSN established a new set of values within folk that made the music universally accessible to a whole new, post-Depression generation; sure – Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and about a half-dozen other poet-musicians helped out with the...
As part of the music epidemic survey group, I’m here to inform you of awesome electronic music and its influence on the youth of this world. Recently there has been a huge outbreak in Los Angeles. We had quarantine over the main area, LA Memorial Coliseum and Exposition Park. It’s been recorded that we have well over 135,000 people were within the quarantine and they were infected with the awesome electronic music. It was exposed to them though multiple hot...
How many bands can say that they started outside of the box and ignored the conventions of established rock orthodoxy but coerced a legion of fans to follow them without attempting to reach for the brass ring of success even once? The Mars Volta can. Since appearing on the popular radar six years ago, Mars Volta has done nothing but continue its course and won a significant fan base the old fashioned way: on the strength of their music, word...
Funny thing about Wilco and their luck. Ever since the band lost a member as well as the confidence of their old record label (Reprise) during the recording sessions for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot but came out on top with a whole lot of kudos for the aforementioned album, the band's fans have tried to imbue each succeeding release with the same sort of mental distress – whether genuine, deserved or actually present or not. It has reached the point now...
There is something about the energy level of a hometown show by a Bay Area metal band that just cannot be surpassed. Case in point – although Testament was playing the approximately 1100 person capacity Fillmore, there was a buzz in the air that made me feel like I was transported back in time to an Ozzy Osbourne show at The Cow Palace, circa 1983. People were that excited, and with good reason. It was the band's first time back...
Once, The New York Dolls (along with The Heartbreakers) represented all that was best and bawdiest about the primordial NYC punk scene; they were loud-mouthed, swinging, swaggering queens that nobody wanted to fuck with because they had the dangerous chops to back up their bravado. The band epitomized a romantic image of balls-out rock n' roll in a sea of Eagles/Steely Dan sexless simpiness; David Johansen, Sylvain “Sylvain” Mizrahi, Johnny Thunders, Arthur “Killer” Kane and Billy Murcia had great big...
In the years since he released Play, Moby has seemed to try everything he can think of to escape the shadow of his own greatest (read: best commercially received) sound creation. In the ten years since the singer/producer made a mint marketing every song on Play, he has tried gimmickry (Last Night), repetition (18) and ignoring what he's accomplished in the past (Hotel) as methods to get out from under Play and the fantastic public reception of it. Unfortunately, either...
What do you get when you intermingle the sensibilities and staple motifs of every globally celebrated pop act from the last forty-five years with some of the great melodic outsiders and misfits from the same period? That's the question Patrick Watson asks (and answers) with Wooden Arms – an album have would see Syd Barrett, Edgard Varèse, the entire cast from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Mothers Of Invention and The Magic Band sit down to dine and...