What is Anarchism?: An Introduction 2nd Ed. by Donald Rooum, Andrej Gruba?i?, and Vernon Richards Lord knows we need more books dedicated to bringing Anarchist ideas to the masses, and one thing that’s appealing from Donald Rooum’s What is Anarchism is how inviting it looks at a glance. First of all, it’s slender but not comically so (about 150 pages), and the chapters are organized to address very important and specific questions, like Approaches to Anarchism, and Anarchism and Violence....
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the vinyl reissue of Naveed by Our Lad Peace. Now with the benefit of hindsight, it is genuinely incredible when one considers how many classic bands just seemed to materialize from nowhere on the streets of Toronto in the first half of the 1990s. That might sound like an overstatement to those who came along later, but it’s true; bands like The Tragically Hip, the Headstones, Gorp, 13 Engines, The Morganfields, Thrush...
Bracket Hold Your Applause It’s a wonderful world we live in where Bracket is still fighting the good fight and putting out records even though the songs they bring to the world are heavy in content. Seriously, Bracket songs can get rocking and sad as hell at the same time. But then again, this band has always been an underdog that’s full of surprises. Most people know Bracket as a FAT band, but that’s only part of their history. They...
How to Write About Music: Excerpts from the 33 1/3 Series, Magazines, Books and Blogs with Advice from Industry-leading Writers by Marc Woodworth (Editor), Ally Jane Grossan (Editor) Now let me stop you before you way anything. I know what you’re thinking: a music website reviewing a book about how to write about music? Preposterous, right? What are you as the reader supposed to take from a book like this? Well, just listen for a second… As someone who spends...
Cowboy Bebop The Complete Series Welcome to our series of anime shows which we will be covering for the next few weeks. Whatever your opinion of the genre, the fact remains that anime (or Japanimation in general) is a fantastic medium for storytelling. In many ways the genre has been ahead of western television because it seems like anime series have always understood that you can tell a more complex story over the course of many episodes. On the...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the California Heart LP by Great Apes. It is often said that the mastering process required to present music on vinyl (instead of CD or mp3) is part of what really changes the overall experience of the format (above and beyond the obvious physical contact made between stylus and vinyl), but that still doesn’t exactly explain the difference a listener will discover between a digital copy of Great Apes’ newest album, California...
RASL by Jeff Smith Jeff Smith has made a permanent fan out of me against all odds. I’ve only read his book Bone, but what an epic tale that was. And Bone is far from being a perfect story, but that’s just the kind of impact the book can have on people. Smith creates worlds full of interesting and complex characters and the man knows how to move the plot along. Also, I read Bone in the original black-and-white format...
Originally appeared April 2015 I’m sitting on a couch backstage at the Brighton Music Hall in Boston on a rainy spring day with Jon Spencer next to me while he looks at my record collection. They happen to be Blues Explosion records and now that I’ve finished interviewing him and I asked him to sign a couple records (What can I say? That side comes out of me sometimes). He’s taking his time looking at them. Almost as if he’s...
There’s nothing I like better than being completely surprised by a random album sent to me by a label. Especially when you expected comedy albums and get a curveball mized in in the form of a music/comedy album. Especially when you actually end up really enjoying the album. Then especially when you find out the artist is from your hometown of Boston. Zach Sherwin’s Rap! is all of these things. Yes, it sounds a lot like Flight of...
While I heard a lot of people complain that 2016 was a really poor year for rock and all its associated sub-genres (punk, hardcore, hard rock, stoner rock, metal et c.), the only thing I can assume is that those critics simply weren’t listening. In fact; picking out just ten great albums this year was nearly fucking impossible; doing so forced me to leave out many albums, those by Fat White Family, Dandy Warhols, XIXA and Pup among them. It...