If you haven’t slept in about ninety-six hours, the world is a very strange place. Edges don’t look clean anymore—they sort of vibrate with an energy like snow on a television screen—your eyes have difficulty focusing and the most mundane things seem cold and faded, yet piercing, exaggerated and crushing in their presence. If that sensation made a sound, it would be Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago—a record that exposes singer Justin Vernon’s desires, but moves at a careful...
Oscar Wilde once wrote that “The difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.” In the case of Gutter Twins founders Greg Dulli (ex-Afghan Whigs, Twilight Singers) and Mark Lanegan (ex-Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age), they straddle the line because they have the benefit of both. More than five years in the making, The Gutter Twins’ debut treads darkly through the recesses of the pair’s regrets,...
Matt Costa has played all over the world to huge crowds. He's been mobbed in airports and had fans who don't speak English sing along word for word. Yet to launch his new record Unfamiliar Faces, Costa headed back home to Southern California to rest, relax and play a few in-stores—you know, a laid-back intimate setting for his hometown fans. Ground Control caught up with him at Encinitas' famed Lou's Records, where a line of kids who bought his album...
Invariably at the beginning of any young band’s career, its members have to decide what the future will look like for their group. Such decisions usually happen after the group’s first release; at that point the pressure’s off, they’ve gone in every direction that they cared to go and—while taking the reception of said release into account—the decision needs to be made as to which variation is the band’s best fit. Such was the crossroads at which Los Campesinos! found...
Walking into a half-filled Fillmore, I was a bit unsure of what to expect to say the least. I have always been a huge fan of the New York Dolls, but when a band is touring 35 years after their heyday, and only 2 of the 5 founding members are still alive, wouldn't you be a bit dubious? Although I had heard nothing but good things about the current incarnation of the band, as well as this tour, I just...
As promised, we will continue to get the best of the best new music into your eardrums, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get best of the best music into your iPods. This edition features an artist that GC loves, and an actress-turned-singer that GC loves (She & Him), a funky hit machine with a hankering for releasing that hot track right as you get spring fever (Gnarls Barkley), a 90s artist who just won’t call it quits (The Breeders) and...
After their first resurrection in 1998, it seemed the godfathers of goth rock were finally in a coffin somewhere. Just like Dracula though, this undead band is one that’s impossible to kill off without that lucky wooden stake. Go Away White is Bauhaus’ first—and last, according to their website—album since their initial breakup just before the release Burning from the Inside in 1983. During the recording of that album, lead singer Peter Murphy was stricken with near-fatal pneumonia, leaving the...
The Black Angels are proud to announce the release of their second record on Light in the Attic Records. Titled Directions to See a Ghost, the record was produced by the band, along with Passover producer Erik Wofford, and will be released on May 13, 2008. Bathed in haunting psychedelic, opiated chiaroscuro, the songs on Directions to See a Ghost are both hypnotic and driving at the same time. Dynamics are essential to the proceedings—drums pound and crescendos explode and...
Adam Turla has some serious explaining to do. His voice is getting progressively lower in tone with every album. If you don’t believe me, go to their Myspace and listen to the following songs in order: Like The Exorcist, But More Breakdancing's “I’m Afraid of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Wolfe,” “Killbot 2000” (off of their 2003 opus Who Will Survive, And What Will Be Left Of Them?), “Brother” (from 2006’s In Bocca Al Lupo), and finally “Comin’ Home” from Red...