For the second album in a row, notoriously road shy David Berman is taking his Silver Jews on tour. In support of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, the Joos will undertake a six week road trip across the face of this great nation, and will probably find some characters to lovingly paint into the next Silver Jews album, hypothetically due in 2011. Fellow Drag City-ites Monotonix—who Berman discovered while touring in Israel—will open on select dates. Get your fix while they...

For the second album in a row, notoriously road shy David Berman is taking his Silver Jews on tour. In support of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, the Joos will undertake a six week road trip across the face of this great nation, and will probably find some characters to lovingly paint into the next Silver Jews album, hypothetically due in 2011. Fellow Drag City-ites...

In rare cases does the core concern of an artist have the chance to be poured out in one of their music videos. An artist will most likely do it at an award ceremony, leaving us with an awkward moment rather then their intent, a social statement that has a chance to change opinions. Lucky for us we have Moby to do it right. His humbleness leaves us with an awesome thought, a minimalistic approach and great view to change...

San Francisco has definitely had its fair share of "once in a lifetime" type shows over the years. And from Metallica on stage with Mercyful Fate at The Stone to a "surprise" Nine Inch Nails gig at The Oasis, or an epic Mentors New Year's Eve show, I've been lucky enough to witness more than a few performances that most people never got the opportunity to see, simply because they never happened anywhere else. As I look back on all...

It’s funny how history mutates as events unfold. In 1988, for example, Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff landed like an atomic bomb on record store shelves (to put perspective on the analogy, Nirvana's Nevermind did hit bigger a few years later—not unlike how a hydrogen bomb would) and college radio airwaves and forcing an epiphany in listeners at the same time. Granted, no one has ever intimated that the band invented grunge but, in those embryonic years, they were the genre’s first...

Anybody with their heads in the underground when grunge erupted from the Pacific Northwest like Mount Ves-who-cares in the early 90s has a fuzzy memory of The Melvins. For those that came late to the party even back then, The Melvins were the band that coulda, shoulda, woulda made it but wound up the bush-league Nirvana instead—Melvins drummer Dale Crover even filled the drum seat before Dave Grohl joined. In addition to that, singer/guitarist Buzz Osborne has found success in...

Now emboldened by the success of his Heroin Diaries, Motley Crue bassist/songwriter Nikki Sixx decided to try a very risky experiment: with glam and hair metal declared dead and the corpse having been incinerated and sealed in a time capsule with Reaganomics, the careers of both Steve Gutenberg and Patrick Duffy before being buried next to the lost episodes of Falcon Crest, could Motley Crue beat every set of odds imaginable and stage a comeback? The band’s members have never...

I love the Internet. I love that major labels have been shitting themselves for the past 10 years, wondering how mp3s are going to affect sales. I love how late they were to react to the barrage of digital downloads that have been offered, and frankly, made bands popular that would NEVER have been popular if it weren't for that free download. But will the majors do it? Hells no. Would they get more interest in their bands if they...

Given the method by which Gregg “Girl Talk” Gillis makes music (sampling every CD in creation, chopping them up and then filtering them down to their greatest, most recognizable moments before assembling original records from the diaspora), each release could be viewed as a variation on a theme when one boils it right down. There isn’t much chance of a remarkable shift in the producer’s sound because he’s still bound by the constraints of the style he’s working in and,...

The following sentence is not hyperbole: The greatest concert I have ever seen was one performed by Sigur Rós. In fact, the second best concert I have ever seen was also performed by Sigur Rós. The music is transcendent, Jónsi’s voice both alien and comforting, the video installations are weird yet apt. The first time I caught them (via a free ticket to the Wiltern), their rendition of "Hafsól"—which was radically different than the version on Von—was so violent that...