Punk rock, as well as the bands that currently make music in the genre, could not ask for a more modest mentor than Bill Stevenson. Boasting a resume that spans over two decades and includes performing credits with such venerable names as Black Flag, Descendants and ALL, as well as a directory of production, mixing, engineering and co-writing credits that reads like the phone book for bands like Lagwagon, The Ataris, Good Riddance, MxPx, Rise Against, Suicide Machines, Anti-Flag, The...

It’s been less than a year since The Most Serene Republic released their debut album and in that short time, as Population illustrates, their sound and the scope of the band’s vision has grown at a nothing less than geometric rate. Now a celestially operatic entity, the album builds to breathtaking plateaus (like "Compliance," "The Men Who Live Upstairs" and "Career In Shaping Clay") before breaking into ecstatic conflicts ("Sherry And Her Butterfly Net," "Present Of Future End")...

Editor's note – The review of Built to Spill is for Friday, 9/21 at the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood. The accompanying photos are from the following night's performance at the Independent in San Francisco. I had this review half-written before I stepped foot in the doors of the Henry Fonda, or so I thought. I was planning on talking about Built to Spill's latest album, You in Reverse, and discussing how it collected the worst tendencies of the band...

If An End Has a Start is Editors’ maxim, it is a confusing one for critics and fans alike. Booked like wildfire for the first of the U.K. sensation’s forthcoming trips to the U.S., they have been touring on the East coast all September, and are coming to San Francisco, San Diego’s Street Scene Festival, and Los Angeles’ own Wiltern Theater at the end of this month, showing no signs of a proverbial “end.” GC talked to Editors’ drummer Ed...

Jose Gonzalez, the incredibly talented singer-songwriter out of Sweden, will soon be releasing his much-anticipated sophomore effort, In Our Nature on September 25. There are already reviews trickling in and it seems that Gonzalez has come a long way from his O.C. performance a few years back. Filter has called the guitar style, “percussive” and the New York Post is already calling it one of the “top 40 albums to own this year.” Continuing, Gonzalez will be embarking on a...

If VH1’s Behind The Music ever decides to branch out from the internal squabbles, trivial psychodramas and minor torments that are de rigueur in most of the episodes they air and start tackling stories about true conflict in music and the bands that make it, the best story to start with would be that of the Meat Puppets. Now back on the road and supporting its first record to boast the musical contributions of both of the founding Kirkwood brothers...

News came today that the US release date for PJ Harvey’s much-anticipated follow-up to 2004’s Uh Huh Her, White Chalk, has been bumped back from a September 25 release to an October 2 release. However, this is only the case in the United States as the album is still due to hit the UK on September 24. If that seems like it’s too far off, check out the first single “When Under Ether” streaming at the top of this page....

I remember when we persuaded an insider man to sneak me and couple of girlfriends into a college cafeteria-cum-coffee-shop venue back when I still believed higher education was the ultimate path to enlightenment. The show featured some scruffy Scotsmen, who were actually not scruffy at all but rather dashingly dressed, and had cleverly named themselves after that Archduke of Austria-Este whose assassination in Sarajevo allegedly began WWI. I remember feeling uncomfortable at the surprising site of the jam-packed cafeteria floor,...

It's an odd feeling these days, to stand in the audience of a show at 27 and be part of the younger half of the audience. The high school and college kids—the ones still searching for their identities—are usually the first adopters of new music, and so make up the majority of the audience at indie shows. Don't deny it, it's true. The older fans, the ones with 9am jobs and mortgages and wives or husbands to get home to...

I can’t quite put my finger on it—I don’t know exactly what it is—but for some reason, growing up soaking up Southern Californian sun rays made me very, very musically stubborn; and if labels mean anything to you, I sneered against anything remotely referred to as “Country Western.” Call it coming of age, that inevitable right of passage, call it whatever you like, but I feel as if I’ve gone soft in my old age (I’m 23; hey that’s so...