I have definite opinions of what makes a great rock concert. Take the same things that make great rock music—energy and originality—and add one more factor: spontaneity. Ideally, the band should play a different set each night, rather than just memorizing a single list of songs. Play around with how they play their songs, not just what they play. If they play an encore, it should be an honest thing, not just another programmed part of the set. And use...

Kanye West: producer, rapper, blogger, sunglasses model, and much much more. He's proven that he can conquer basically any task he sets himself. With his latest, 808s And Heartbreak, he's crossed over into music criticism; there's no more accurate and concise description of his latest album than its title. It's a record of spare beats and depressive lyrics about myriad failed relationships. It conjures a world where everyone's worst fears about love spool out over simple and impossibly catchy beats:...

After seeing In Flames deliver a short but pretty kick ass set earlier this year as part of Gigantour, I knew that when they returned to the Bay Area on their own headlining tour that I would not be missing them. And when I saw that one of my favorite new bands, Gojira, was on board the tour as a support act, I was all over it. Up first was 36 Crazyfists, a "metalcore" band hailing from Portland, Oregon. As...

Given the nature of Rivers Cuomo’s previous raid of his own vaults which yielded the first installment of Alone, fans probably had a good idea of what to expect from Alone II – another collection of embryonic Weezer songs. That isn’t what Alone II represents though; it’s a far more finessed collection than that. There are no false starts that would eventually appear on a proper studio album years later, these are ideas that were aborted by an incredibly prolific...

There are a few things that have always characterized music as rock n’ roll since the day Ike Turner committed the thrill of joyriding around in a “Rocket ‘88” to tape: a lawless disregard for authority, a few rampaging and unhinged libidinous urges, crunching distorted guitars to begin with, and all of it crowned by a singer that doesn’t care if the exertion of his performance leaves him able to speak the next day or not. In the fifty years...

I have definite opinions of what makes a great rock concert. Take the same things that make great rock music—energy and originality—and add one more factor: spontaneity. Ideally, the band should play a different set each night, rather than just memorizing a single list of songs. Play around with how they play their songs, not just what they play. If they play an encore, it should be an honest thing, not just another programmed part of the set. And use...

It was unusually cold for Long Beach. Normally, this is the kind of town where anything approaching raindrops is cause for doomsayers everywhere to break out the tinfoil headwear and prepare for the apocalypse, and the air had a certain unknowable charge to it that evening as I strode down the block to the Prospector. The Prospector is an amazing little restaurant, covered in western-themed murals, that has been almost entirely absorbed by its bar section. The eatery section of...

Okay, first things first. The CD: I’m biased. I’ve seen Justice perform their Cross live show twice, I loved their album, and I have thousands of dollars of stock in crunchy basslines. So it should come as no surprise when I tell you that sometimes I kiss this CD when no one’s looking. For the uninformed, Justice are a duo of French electronic musicians who took the club-destroyer aspects of their countrymen Daft Punk, blended it with the funky pop...

If it can be assumed that popular music (and specifically rock 'n’ roll) has functioned to date as a sociological model, it stands to reason that the evolutionary progression of it would mirror that of the art form’s human component; those that make the music will, whether intentionally or not, follow a similar progression of development. Under that rationale, what the public bore witness to in the 1950s was not the “Golden Age Of Rock ‘n’ Roll” but, rather, the...

Once again The Grand Ballroom fooled me. When I see a start time of 8pm, I don't expect the show to actually start at 7:45pm. But for the second time this month, a show there started early, and for the second time I missed most of an amazing set from the opening band. After making my way through a few slight snags, I finally obtained my photo pass and walked into the venue just as Portland, Oregon's Toxic Holocaust launched...