A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the This Is How Democracy Dies LP by Brigata Vendetta. Okay, after the last few years of pundits both educated and ill-informed questioning the health and longevity of democracy and looking at the concept so closely the eye-strain could easily be attributable to a migraine, the idea of another punk band stepping forward to declare, “Us too!” is almost laughable enough to drive this critic into a stress-induced mental breakdown. Happily though,...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the All That Matters Is This Matter LP by Holy Beach. Someone wise once said that “Variety is the soul of pleasure. Variety is the condition of harmony. The best way to keep good acts in memory is to refresh them with new. Variety is the very spice of life that gives it all its flavor.” In that spirit, The Deftones once totally reinvigorated heavy metal music by simultaneously making their approach...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the The Old New Me / Times Like This 2LP reissue by Slim Dunlap. Of course, after the collapse, crash and burn of The Replacements in 1991, it was almost instantly hoped that somebody in the band would begin producing more music but nobody looked at Slim Dunlap to be the first one out of the gate. Dunlap was, after all, the replacement guitarist in The Replacements – that was the joke...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the This American Blues LP by Ford Madox Ford. Remember a couple of decades ago when, against some fairly long odds, The Blasters managed to cross-wire punk rock and Americana/roots music? The results were pretty cool – the group actually did manage to break onto the popular radar for a minute (with some help from Quentin Tarantino and the soundtrack from From Dusk Til Dawn), but basically remained pretty niche because punk...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into This Means War’s self-titled 10” EP. The catch, when it comes to trying to be in a good melodic hardcore band, is that trying to navigate the waters of punk rock is fraught with risk because the region is so over-populated. Unfortunately, there are lots of “melodic hardcore” bands which aren’t particularly melodic (read: the singer can’t carry a tune on his back) and aren’t exactly poster boys for hardcore either, for...