It seems like Anthrax has been out in on the road in support of their latest (and quite possibly their finest) release, Worship Music, for well over a year now but, judging from their sold out show at the Ace of Spades in Sacramento earlier this month, the band shows no signs of becoming road weary. Kicking off the second leg of their North American Tour with fellow thrash icons Death Angel and Testament supporting them once again, Anthrax tore...

Remember back between the years 1997 and 2002 – after Alice In Chains went on hiatus but before Layne Staley died, when a bunch of bands including Staind, Godsmack, Days Of The New, Creed and a whole platoon of other soundalike bands rushed in to try and fill the void that band left? Pretty consistently, the first thing each of them did was down-tune their acoustic guitars to try and replicate the cathartic sound that AIC acheived on Jar Of...

It's funny to see how punk rock has mutated over the last few years, and look at what it has become. Since (just say, for the sake of argument) 2008, the genre has really seemed to both regain its identity in some communities, but become far more diffuse in others – but the results have always been mixed, regardless. In the case of OFF!, for example, hardcore punk has proven it can still be a virile force to be reckoned...

Sometimes there is just no rational explanation for events when they occur. In those cases, the bottom line is that whether one accepts or rejects the fact that the event even occurred is irrelevant – the only thing that matters is how one is able to digest the information. A textbook example of the “either deal with it or don't” phenomenon came along twelve years ago when Ben Folds Five just suddenly blipped out of existence without much warning; while...

After OFF! shattered every expectation that anyone could have had of them with their First Four EPs release, the band found itself in the predicament of trying to figure out what to do next. Doing the exact same thing and pointing fingers at the punks in the crowd as they had with their first release would have just gotten them on the fast track to becoming just another nostalgia act, so something had to change – but the question was,...

While it might not have come across through the numbers at which the band's last album sold, the inconvenient truth of the matter is that Green Day has been in a pretty tough spot creatively ever since American Idiot took off like wildfire eight years ago. After that explosion, the band had exactly no idea what to do next as they tried to play to an audience of unprecedented (by punk rock standards) magnitude but came up short of expectation...

Howzitgoin' ya junky reprobates youse? I was walkin' up Avenue B the otha day an' thought thit mebbe – jus' mebbe – ya might be lookin' fer a new hit awready! 'At's right, I thought aboucha, but don' go gettin' all emotional or nothin' – I jus' figgered ya might awready be itchin' even though the SWAG I laid on ya las' week was pretty sweet. So I got onna stick an' I started lookin' an' I foun'a whole bunch...

"So is it better than their last one? Or is it worse?” asked a friend and fellow fan when I told him I was reviewing the new NOFX record. It might sound crass, but the question is valid in the eyes of some fans; over the last little while, NOFX has experimented with a bunch of new ideas and different angles to their music. Some of them have been great and some of them haven't, but fans have supported the...

So is it better than their last one? Or is it worse?” asked a friend and fellow fan when I told him I was reviewing the new NOFX record. It might sound crass, but the question is valid in the eyes of some fans; over the last little while, NOFX has experimented with a bunch of new ideas and different angles to their music. Some of them have been great and some of them haven't, but fans have supported the...

Even if you're not the single greatest fan of a band, it's hard not to get into them a little when you're joined in a room by a bunch of other people who are loving what they're seeing. Such is the epiphany that Ground Control head photographer Raymond Ahner had when he walked into DNA Lounge to shoot Finnish folk metal icons Korpiklaani on the eleventh anniversary of September 11th; he wasn't sure what he expected to see, but what...