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...

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...