Over the last couple of years, somehow ‘indie rock’ (which, for those keeping score, started out as a colloquial contraction for ‘independent rock’) became less a term for how and on what scale music was distributed and more a point of definition for a particular sound. Once, ’indie rock’ was music made on a tiny budget with tiny or modest ambitionsin mind but, now, it is more a term that defines ’tiny music’. Whether ’tiny’ refers to the scope, overall...
Gavin Rossdale was wise to let six years lapse between the implosion of alt-frauds Bush and embarking on a solo career. He learned the hard way just how bad a taste he’d left in the public’s mouth when his short-lived follow-up band, Institute, failed to make any headway at all in spite of getting plenty of exposure opening for U2 on their Vertigo Tour in 2004; people were simply not ready or willing to subject themselves to Rossdale’s form of...
Oh, the woes of being a music journalist. (Disclaimer: I use the term “music journalist” loosely… This site obviously offers an amazing forum for fans and people with an ability to write to provide commentary on their favorite shows, bands and albums, but despite my state college degree in journalism and the fact that I once staged a brief sit-in in the lobby of Rolling Stone’s New York office because nobody would take my resume, I’m no Ben Fong-Torres. I...
At exactly 8pm, the Fillmore dims its house lights. Apparently, the pioneers of punk like to start things on time. Target Video begins its tribute film, an appropriate way to kick off the evening. Grainy, vintage, black and white concert footage of The Nuns, Noh Mercy, Iggy Pop and Dead Kennedys flashes across the screen. Crude and intense, the video is like moshing down memory lane for the older audience members. For the youngsters (i.e., anyone born during/after the 1980s),...
For a musician that has, in times and confines passed, been known to take as many as five years to follow up a record, that Trent Reznor has released four albums of material (three of all-new songs and one remix disc) in only fifteen months doesn`t just say that the singer thinks he has something to prove, it screams it. Now freed from the confines of a major label, Reznor has elected to use his newest effort as the thing...
(This is part 2 of our coverage of the 2008 Rockstar Mayhem Festival. Part 1 can be viewed here.) After a couple of beers and chilling out for a bit, it was time to head back over to the Jägermeister stage again to catch one of the bands that I was really looking forward to seeing today, the Bay Area's own Machine Head. Standing in the photo pit in front of the stage with an endless sea of people behind...
Prepare for an absolutely horrible pun. Word on The Streets is (see, you were warned) Mike Skinner will be releasing the follow-up to 2006's The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living when Everything is Borrowed hits shelves on September 15th. In support of Everything is Borrowed, The Streets will spend much of October on the road through his native England. No further, non-UK tour dates have been announced yet, so either keep your fingers crossed or save up for...
At first blush, Ponytail's Ice Cream Spiritual sounds like an art school exploding. Chaos reigns – thunderous drums, insane guitars, and otherworldly screaming in gibberish from lead “singer” Molly Siegel. Everyone in the band seems to be playing a different song; guitar riffs pop up out of nowhere, repeat a few times, and then fade out, to be replaced by a different, totally unrelated riff a few moments later. You might not have noticed that, though, because there was another...
There is a fair amount of audacity in releasing a double disc collection of live music—one that stretches across six sides of 180 gram black vinyl. But audacity, the willingness to say “fuck it, let's do it,” has been a large part of the draw of the Fiery Furnaces. To release a record like this makes sense if you're Miles Davis, or if you've just recorded an all-star concert for Bangladesh—but like I mentioned, for the Fiery Furnaces, it is...