2011 has been a red letter year for Touche Amore. The band has spent the year touring hard – appearing at festivals like FYF, SXSW, Chaos in Tejas, Hevy Fest (UK), the House of Vans in Brooklyn, and cutting a swath across most of the globe. While all that was happening, the band also released Parting The Sea Between Brightness and Me, to staggering critical acclaim earlier this summer; from the first strikes of their angular yet melodic chords, it's...
Since Tom Waits' music first started appearing on record store shelves thirty-eight years ago, the singer has traveled to all four corners of the musical map. He's been dozens of characters in that time too; he's been a coffee shop crooner, a back-alley bard, a jazz-cat gigolo and (most recently) a backwoods boondock saint as given to pounding on the tin walls of a chicken coop for percussion as he is to finding a drum kit. Waits has been everywhere...
Awrightcha mugs, Good ta see ya. In fact, i's great ta see ya – I ben cooped up in my apartment fer days, layin' low (long story). Anyways, da beauty o' bein' stuck at home izzat I got ta shake as many tunes outta da inta-tree as possible. I got some good ones fo'ya too junky, check t out: I nabbed'a first new song from Bass Drum Of Death ta come out since dey put out ther dig deal album...
Punk rock (one could say the right kind of punk rock) has had a shinier-than-usual spotlight put on it these days, partly because of what bands like Fucked Up are doing. I say “bands like” out of formality because, to be honest, I should say it’s simply because of Fucked Up. Their latest album David Comes To Life is so ambitious, offers so much, and works on so many levels that it’s the perfect album to divert an average non-punk...
Some shows just feel like they are destined to become released as live recordings. The set list, sound engineering and an otherwise indescribable atmosphere that is somehow able to work its way onto the recording all contribute to what makes a memorable live record. These great albums, which don’t come along very often, are captured moments in time – shared events that take on a distinctive quality for those who wish they could have been there and also for those...
Ever wondered what the smaller names in great big bands do while they wait for their more recognizable bandmates to get to work on new material? They don't just sit on their thumbs; everyone's got bills to pay, so musicians will often try and find other things to do which (they hope) will sustain them through the intervening months and/or years between “big artist” releases and tours. Such “extra curricular” endeavors are typified by Zenith Myth and its self-titled debut...
At what point is it safe to call a project which was once regarded as a silly sidebar operation a serious new endeavor that deserves serious attention? Such is exactly the question that Tool/ A Perfect Circle/ Puscifer fans will be asking themselves when they hear “Conditions of My Parole,” the newest, most creatively forthright and most well-rounded album by Maynard James Keenan's Puscifer project. Founded in 2007 as Keenan's release valve away from Tool and A Perfect Circle, Puscifer's...
Over the last ten years, singer/guitarist Charles Thompson (a.k.a. Black Francis, a.k.a. Frank Black) has seemed intent on proving to his fans that the scope of sound he's capable of creating is limited only by his imagination – but the catch is that not everything he has recorded necessarily merits release. Since 2001, Thompson has put out fourteen albums of new material but, for every gold nugget he has presented (like Devil's Workshop, Honeycomb and Bluefinger), there have been as...
It's been an incredibly busy year for Dave Grohl. In addition to celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind album and granting a few interviews for the reissue (Jon Stewart's Q&A with Grohl and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic was a phenomenal moment), the Foo Fighters singer has also found time to release Wasting Light and embark upon a massive world tour which has already covered the United Kingdom,...
On listening to the first few tracks of Peter Gabriel’s new album, New Blood, my knee-jerk reaction was, “Oh no, Peter’s gotten old, really old, and has resorted to the "symphonic background" method of music making to popularize his old hits.” It was a chilling thought which didn't thrill me in the slightest but, happily, by the time I heard the fourth and fifth tracks on the album, I knew I was wrong in my assumption. I suspect that the...