Rare beauties emerge in Iron & Wine’s latest release with a two-disc collection of a rare, never-before-heard and new-to-print collection of unyielding goodness. From hidden treasures of 2002’s The Creek Drank the Cradle to soundtrack-bound leftovers and side-picks from The Shepherd’s Dog in 2007, this sampling from the span of Iron & Wine’s career is nothing short of magic, especially for those rabid fans—however rabid folk fans can get. The first disc is a deliberate, lower-fidelity collection of soulful...

Hope and belief, particularly when combined in a desperate mind, can be potentially intoxicating things. For example, when the Kirkwood brothers reunited under the Meat Puppets moniker and released Rise To Your Knees in 2007, it felt and (at the time) sounded like they had arrived – again. The songs sounded pretty good and, because it had been so long since anything bearing the band's name had even held a candle to the dynamism they once possessed (about eleven years...

In his 47-year tenure as a professional musician, Bob Dylan has imposed a series of stylistic modifications on his songwriting style to satiate his muse (he's been “reborn” and born again – as just two examples) but usually by the time those changes are presented to fans, they're so complete, seamless and confidently presented that they're regularly referred to as “comeback” albums – even if the creative ground covered on them is fresh to him. With that common critical approach...

When a show sells out well in advance at The Great American Music Hall, there is a pretty good chance it's going to be, at least what I consider, "epic." I can think of more than a handful of shows that went down at GAMH over the years where tickets were snatched up weeks beforehand, and every single one of them turned out to be nothing short of incredible. Amebix, Jello Biafra, The Melvins, Social Distortion, Neurosis and Motörhead are...

For the last twenty-four years (give or take), NoFX has enjoyed a sort of extended adolescence because they've managed to keep a perfect balance of sophomoric lyrical content (jokes about the human body as well as its tolerance for consumption of drugs and alcohol and the comic results of testing those limits) and prescient social and political commentary that always sounds fresh and biting rather than repetitive. To date, it's been an easy road to run but, maybe because the...

…Well, that was fast. About three years ago, Anti-Flag finally stepped up (some would say, “Sold Out,” but that's over-reaching unnecessarily) and signed a deal with a major label conglomerate in the form of Sony BMG, RCA and Red Distribution. The theory for the change was sound enough, they wanted to reach a larger audience and make a greater impact upon the world at large with the political manifesto so integral to their image. The added bonus was that the...

As any musician can (and will) tell you, sometimes songs – good ones, bad ones, odd ones and ones that just don't fit anywhere – get written and then written off almost immediately. Sometimes it's simply a matter of the musician's own interest that finds them falling by the wayside; sure, it might be a good song, but it's not representative of where the musician or group in question wants to be heading creatively and so it gets buried under...

Over the last few years, a remarkable number of the great (and greatly under-appreciated) rock bands from the Eighties and Nineties have staged reunion concerts and tours to impressive fanfare and critical kudos (to date, the list of great – at least partially – reunited includes Flipper, The Germs, X, Smashing Pumpkins, The Pixies and Alice In Chains), but the single greatest shock came when Dinosaur Jr. announced that the band's original line-up was back together and had plans to...

Subversive, antagonistic, esoteric—these are words I would use to describe Throbbing Gristle’s legacy as one of the forefathers of the industrial music genre. Touching on subject matters like fascism, mutilation, degradation and the overall darker side of the human experience, have made for some of the most uneasy music to listen to. That may not sound that “extreme” these days, but Throbbing Gristle was doing this back in the mid-70s. The show in San Francisco at the The Grand Ballroom was...

This album is a study in the measurement of rain. And considering Jeremy Enigk hails from Seattle, that kind of makes sense. The former front man of the now-defunct (and somewhat ironically) named band Sunny Day Real Estate brings his fourth solo effort, Ok Bear, out into the murky filtered light of cloudy days. From dizzying drizzle of acoustic guitars that still hearkens the outdoors, to cloistered pattering of lonely pianos and ambient synth sounds, to torrential floods of booming...