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...
Dammit, Mom, you weren’t supposed to let me quit. Sure, I was freakishly taller than the other girls in my elementary dance class—so tall that you had to hand-sew my costume for Hansel and Gretel that one year. I know I begged you to let me out of that daily torture of uncomfortable shoes and impossibly high expectations, but moms are supposed to be tougher than that. Persevere. And if you had forced your little girl to continue dancing down...
Over the last couple of years a lot of noise has been made about singer/DJ MIA’s seemingly audacious and outrageous behavior, but all of those that make such claims have clearly not yet heard The Kills. Moaning, sighing and yowling like a more carnal incarnation of Boss Hog singer Cristina Martinez, Kills frontwoman Allison Mosshart gets wet from the orgasmic opening and stuttering groove of “U.R.A. Fever” and, because she’s left unsatisfied and hanging on the telephone as the dial...
On a cool night in L.A.’s trendy Silver Lake neighborhood, The Helio Sequence is eating dinner at a cheap Thai restaurant. It’s an unglamorous but not unusual night for the band, which recently set out on a tour to promote its new album, Keep Your Eyes Ahead. The band’s fourth album—and second since inking a deal with indie mega-label Sub Pop—reveals a more confident sound and mature songwriting, but front man Brandon Summers and his best friend, drummer Benjamin Weikel,...
Walking out of Slim's with my ears ringing after the show, I immediately started to think about how I was going to start this review. I usually like to prelude my reviews of metal and punk shows with some ego stroking, and by writing (and rambling) on and on about how hardcore or "old school" I think I am because I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and my friends and I watched as the whole thrash-metal scene...
Thrill of It All: A Visual History 1972-1982 is a two-DVD history of Roxy Music, a band which went from being one of the most adventurous in rock music to one of the tamest. A wealth of performance videos—including concert footage, television appearances and promotional videos— clearly present their progression from the glammest of glam rock bands to the most romantic of the New Romantics. When Roxy Music debuted in 1972, they were the epitome of art rock, at once...
This installment of "Overanalysis" is all about getting low. In fact, as I write this, I am huddled down deep in a concrete bunker, avoiding child support payments. The song this week is called “Low,” and it’s by some guy I’ve never heard of named Flo Rida. I’m going to assume that he was so overcome by his own cleverness that, after breaking the state’s name into two pseudowords, he completely neglected to determine why or how one might go...