There are moments – and this is one of them – when the benefit of hindsight can incite an enormous sigh of relief that comes from the knowledge that, realistically, events in history could have played out very differently but, because they didn't, it makes the world seem like a better, saner place. Take the early workings of Beck's career for example – when Mellow Gold hit in 1994, it gave Generation X and the earliest-born of Generation Y their...

Sometimes when one works in the press, it's just logistically impossible to tell the whole story of an artist – or even enough of that story to make it feel fulfilling to the writer. It seems like such an asinine statement, but think about it; in the average magazine, there is a finite number of pages which means that only so much space can be allotted to a particular story. This is a hard truth because, particularly if a writer...

There isn't a punk rocker on Earth that doesn't want to hate Brody Dalle. When the singer first appeared on North American soil and formed The Distillers, she didn't so much feminize punk as attempt to play with the boys, like the boys but, because she wasn't much of a singer or much of a songwriter, only ended up sounding conveniently ironic on the mic; not really adding much to the scene, but certainly taking as much as she could...

Returning to your roots, finding who you are, rocking out with complete strangers, breaking a sweat, bringing it back with your favorite drink, and finishing the night by singing along to Prodigy. It never starts with the headliner, so let us rewind it to the top. Arriving at a new venue is always awesome. You have to find the spot that you’ll always go to when you attend future concerts, and then hunt down your favorite place to get a...

I arrived a little late to the Fillmore and my ears perked: The Crocodiles were playing. I caught the last two songs of this opening band for the Faint and they were great. Sole band members, Charles Rowland and Brandon Welchez, along with a drum machine tore through the remaining two songs of their set. I’m really partial to the whole Jesus and Mary Chain/Spacemen 3 (with a new wave twist) sound that the Crocodiles are dialed into, so it...

It's been eleven years since Placebo struck platinum with “Pure Morning” – essentially a celebration of substance abuse, STDs and the morning after – and then promptly vanished from sight. For those that weren't sure, the reason it happened was because the band was just too novel for its own good; they looked like Jane's Addiction (or tried to) but sounded about as masculine as the Violent Femmes backed with a wall of synthesizers and, while there has been no...

Thirteen years ago, while she was riding high on the mass acclaim that Rid Of Me and To Bring You My Love afforded her, Polly Jean Harvey exerted a little creative freedom and knocked out the raw, rough-hewn Dance Hall At Louse Point with John Parish. That album was a revelation; still angry and still emotionally injured, Harvey showed that she was still vulnerable too and, amid a much softer, more homegrown backdrop, proved that she was still be all...

As good as so much of the music that came out of the Nineties might have been, trying to trace the lines of influence that any band from that period had on current taste is no easy feat. Of course, people continue to toast Nirvana as having had a modicum of historical validity and there's no doubt that Alice In Chains proved to leave a spectacular and lasting impression that remains felt on pop radio (Godsmack, Theory Of A Deadman,...

At some point in its runtime, every great and deliriously medicated film noir made in the last twenty years seems to feature montage footage of eerie,  disquieting desert scenes that convey the desperation of those surroundings (think Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, U-Turn, The Doors and Natural Born Killers just to name a few). Common features to these montages tend to be images like a dead armadillo on the side of Route 666, scorpions fighting over territory or Gila...

What is the connection between Warner Brothers Records and Epitaph? Since Epitaph bands began jumping to major labels (including Bad Religion, Rancid, The Distillers and more – the exception being The Offspring, who went to Columbia in 1996), they consistently find a homes at Warner or some sub-label of the company and (recently) vice versa as Reprise mainstays Green Day reissued their first two albums on Reprise in North America, but Epitaph everywhere else in the world. Why is that?...