(This is part 2 of our coverage of the 2008 Rockstar Mayhem Festival. Part 2 can be viewed here.) I'm not quite ready to say that the Rockstar Mayhem Festival has taken the place of Ozzfest as the premier summer metal festival, but I will say that Sharon and Ozzy need to turn around and take a look at who is running full force behind them, because Rockstar is right on their asses, and seems ready to take over the...
Sometimes a band that you thought you had pegged will turn around and surprise you by totally reinventing its sound between records (also known as when you weren’t looking) and so, when a new album eventually appears, you’re totally caught off-guard by what you hear. That moment of initial confusion—when that first song starts and you don’t know what you’re listening to right away because it’s just so different—can be incredibly exciting because your brain works frantically to reassess this...
To quote Magnum P.I., “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right…” how does a re-issue of a gimmick get made without getting called a farce? From day one, Me First And The Gimme Gimmes was based on the flimsiest of ideas – taking the staple songs of the contempo-casual elite (including Paul Simon, John Denver, Billy Joel, Elton John, Carole King, Neil Diamond and more) and giving them a more sneering punk rock treatment – that only worked because...
Entertainers of every stripe and discipline are strange breeds of creature. For whatever reason, as soon as an individual gets into one quadrant or another of the arts and makes it in his or her profession, the grass begins to look greener on the other side of the septic tank; actors want to make music, musicians want to star in motion pictures, painters want to do theatre and writers want to direct. Why? Undiscovered countries are alluring territory when you’re...
What is going on out on the west coast of Canada? They boast the healthiest population in the country, are the least polluted and have the most consistent weather, yet still so much of the musical population (beginning with Hot Hot Heat) has an obsession with The Cure. Don’t think it’s true? Check out The Paper Cranes’ new album. From the dancing pianos that drive the impossibly upbeat opener “I’ll Love You Until My Veins Explode” that’s only manically dour...
The popular theory is that Brian Wilson was the creative drive behind The Beach Boys and it’s true; Brian is the face of the band and his story is the one that most people regard as the definitive one for the rise and fall of the band that popularized the surf pop sound. What most people don’t realize is that Brian wasn’t the only Wilson to make music outside of The Beach Boys. In fact, he wasn’t even the first...
What a piece of work is Billy Idol. In the late Seventies, there was no arguing that the punk band he fronted, Generation X, was at the bottom of the British punk pile that managed to make it across the ocean. Idol was the embodiment of what Iggy Pop called the “Dum Dum Boy”; he wasn’t the greatest or most charismatic singer, DX’s songs were perfectly average at best and the combination of those elements really only amounted to a...
Sometimes when a producer begins to get legs under him and gets known as an “it” producer, anyone paying attention knows that the paths of the individual in question and a particular musician will cross. It’s a foregone conclusion; they’re destined to work together because they’re cut from the same musical cloth and their established previous patterns would mesh well together. For example, when Danger Mouse crowned his string of successes (Gorillaz’ Demon Days, The Good, The Bad and The...
In 2006, Bound Stems proved to the world that they are more than capable of writing great songs, which they did quite well on their debut LP Appreciation Night. But the soon-to-be-released follow up, The Family Afloat, exists at a different level entirely. Their debut demonstrated how well they infused pop with complex rhythms and arrangements and that you should expect the unexpected. This sensibility still remains, however, but more as an ingredient rather than the entire dish. In two...
There are few things more logistically difficult to sort out than the way that Broken Social Scene works. There’s no reason for that really, other than the fact that there are so many songwriters in the band—so many heads—that it makes bands like The Mekons or Husker Du (which each had three songwriters that produced enough material to be considered ‘chief songwriters’ in other bands) look simple to qualify, and there is a rotating cast of personnel through the door....