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),...

For the average, jaded audiophile born and raised on a steady diet of radio and trash culture, few things are so instantly captivating than glitch music. It seems to function like static sound on the outside, but treading even slightly below the surface reveals a writhing entity trying to coalesce from a series of random snippets of code into a complex organism. Entering into a glitch album's aural landscape is like channel-surfing on six televisions at once while sitting at...

I wasn’t sure what to expect for my first session at the Roxy in Hollywood. To go to a place where some legendary people have played is always fun for me. Of course the dark-dungeonous feel of the inside, with black and white portraits of legendary artists was exactly what I was expecting. This place is on the same road as the Key Club and The Viper Room. To expect anything else would be quite a peculiar thought. LMFAO’s record...

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...