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...

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...