Right around the middle of the 1990s, the underground demigods of the previous decade (Butthole Surfers, Meat Puppets, Mission Of Burma, the list goes on) finally got their due topside because bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam sang their praises; in an attempt to get the bands they loved some popular attention. It worked out too – because those bands just happened to have hit a point in their musical evolution that was palatable to mainstream audiences. Meat Puppets, in...

People always say that I’m nuts. Loco. Insane. Incomprehensible. It could be that I’m bi-polar, schizophrenic and manic-depressive in a blender with extra curry, but it could also be captured in a music video by N.E.R.D. that makes no freaking sense at all. That sentence didn’t make sense either. Whatever, let’s get smashed off Patron and Verbally View and Vitiate this Video. N.E.R.D. exploded onto the scene in 2001 with the album In Search of… where we all learned how...

Banished for twelve years because a fluke, throwaway song struck a chord and dragged them into the spotlight for about a month in 1996, Local H got dubbed a one-hit wonder with the success of “Bound For The Floor” and were then summarily forgotten when the band didn’t grab the brass ring and start writing sound-alike hits. The band was more interested in following its muse than cashing in and they paid for it; wandering to no less than four...

I had been waiting almost twenty-two years to see Candlemass. After purchasing the Epicus Doomicus Metallicus LP at The Record Vault (a nod to all you old school S.F. metalheads) way back in 1986, I immediately began to worship the band and their heavy-as-fuck Doom Metal. Aside from side two of Sabbath's Paranoid, I had never heard anything so absolutely epic before, and kept waiting and waiting for a chance to see them live. Unfortunately I ended up missing them...

I was really looking forward to his show. I had seen Arch Enemy a few times in the past, but they were always one of the support bands on the bill, and never seemed to get quite enough time on stage. Their latest offering, Rise Of The Tyrant, has been in my current rotation for some time now, and I was totally looking forward to finally hear some of these songs live. So with all that being said I have...

There reaches a point when all the semantics, wordplay and pontificating fall away—when years of frustration are finally relieved. This is one of those moments. To be as blunt as the situation requires, it’s about fucking time The Offspring smashed its head into punk rock again. In the last eleven years, the band has chased its Dickies-inspired muse and released a succession of very novel records that were sweet, cutesy and poppy, and each yielded a couple of (easily dated...

Last month I argued that listening to an entire album is a superior experience to just listening to individual songs. Now I'm going to tackle the question of which is the better format on which to listen to an entire album—LP or CD? I realize that, for most of us, this is a moot question. Most of us couldn't listen to LPs any more, even if we wanted to. (My own turntable died long ago.) And many of us, nowadays,...

In celebration of their soon-to-be-released third album, O, Tilly and the Wall are about to head out on a 25-date jaunt around this great country of ours. I really hope it goes well because I just drove from L.A. to Chicago in a friggen Penske truck and we spent about $700 in gas to go 2200 miles. So we’re doing our part to help get these hardworkin’ Nebraskans some good ol’ fashioned lovin’. In return, Till and the Wall have...

Didn’t David Berman’s laconic on-the-lam storytelling match so well with Stephen Malkmus’ blazing guitarwork? Their dubious pairing made American Water one of the premiere on-the-road albums of not just the ‘90s but maybe all-time. After that musical landmark, Berman’s mainstay project has seen its fair share of artists arrive on the horizon and leave in the morning. The Jews’ revolving door lineup didn’t seem to help perfectly able but ultimately disappointing recent albums like Tanglewood Numbers and...

It’s summertime, and that means that there are a gajillion summer tours abound that kids and adults can flock to in hopes that they don’t have to sit through bands they hate while they wait patiently for the one they love. And the people behind me at the House of Blues in Chicago OBVIOUSLY were there to see Mr. Sexythang himself, Justin Warfiled of She Wants Revenge. From their remarks during The Virgins and Be Your Own Pet, they had...