review

A Raw Youth CD by Le Butcherettes Ipecac Recordings Reviewed by G. Murray Thomas Teri Gender Bender is my new rock star crush, following Patti Smith, Deborah Harry, and Shirley Manson. They are all beautiful (in unique ways), but more important, they all have attitude. Just as their beauty is individual, so is their attitude. Smith’s is expressed in a hardcore stare, daring you to deny her her place at the table with Keith, Jim, and Jimi. Harry’s is a...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the reissue pressing of the Brazen Head EP by Swingin’ Utters. Let me tell you what an absolute joy it is for me to review this album for you on our Vinyl Vlog. We’re going to dig deep for this one; not only are we going to look deeply into the grooves pressed into Brazen Head (one of the most underrated EPs of all time), we’re going to take you through some...

Dave Hill Let Me Turn You On (Aspecialthing/Allegro) Hold onto your seat because this album came completely out of nowhere! But, now that I’m aware of Dave Hill, the guy seems to pop up everywhere. Like, he hosts a show on WFMU and he plays in the band who wrote the theme song to John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. Also, did you know he’s Cleveland’s pride and joy? Also, he’s a comedian and this is his first comedy album. But...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Circle Jerks’ debut album, Group Sex. At this point, six years after the band that Keith Morris, Steven McDonald, Dimitri Coats and Mario Rubalcaba started took off (ahem – no pun intended) and brought hardcore punk into a much brighter and broader spotlight before a much larger audience, the history of where OFF! came from and the circumstances which got them started have been well-documented. It is already a matter of public...

Title: The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader Author: Errico Malatesta AK Press has been doing scholars a service these past few years by putting out some pretty stellar anthologies of some of anarchism’s greatest writers. First it was Proudhon and the Property is Theft! anthology. Then, there was Kropotkin’s Direct Struggle Against Capital. Both edited by Iain McKaye and both informative and thorough. But this anthology on Errico Malatesta takes the cake.  I don’t...

101 Artists To Listen To Before You Die Author: Ricardo Cavolo I have to tell you, there’s nothing that irks me more than false advertisement. Even if Cavolo tells the the reader right at the beginning that this is just a collection of his 101 favorite (or essential to him, at least) artists. Whatever the case may be, 101 Artists to Listen to Before You Die is not what it claims it is, and Cavolo himself admits it. What this...

Slash Raised On The Subset Strip Blu-Ray (Shout Factory) Historians and critics may curse Raised on the Sunset Strip for presenting a documentary which features some pretty plainly revisionist history of the 1980s L.A. rock scene in general and Guns N’ Roses in specific, but there’s no way to deny that the film tells a really interesting story – at least at first. It is, of course, the story of Saul “Slash” Hudson and the series of events which made...

Lou Barlow Brace The Wave (Joyful Noise) I can’t deny it (nor would I want to): I am a Lou Barlow fan. To date, there hasn’t been a musical project of which he was a part that I haven’t loved; Sebadoh, Sentridoh, Dinosaur Jr., Folk Implosion and the stuff he’s just recorded under his own name have all found a home in my record collection. Granted, there was that one EP that Folk Implosion did with Deluxx which I found...

Neil Young and Bluenote Cafe Bluenote Cafe 2CD (Reprise/Warner) Many things could be said for and about Neil Young but, without a doubt, that he was never brash enough to follow a questionable artistic lede through to its conclusion is not one of them. One of the best examples of that can be found in the guitarist’s straight-up blues/R&B period; in the late Eighties (read: long after The Blues Brothers might have made the sound popular enough to turn Bluenote...

The Flaming Lips Heady Nuggs 1994-1997 – 20 Years After Clouds Taste Metallic (Warner Brothers Records) As most fans know, The Flaming Lips had already gone through a few semi-seamless transitions by the time they were ready to begin making Clouds Taste Metallic. By then, they’d already been DIY Okie punks and goth-y pseudo rockers, and had even managed to sort of put together an arresting estimation of their first genuinely golden sound (see Transmissions From The Satellite Heart, released...