Celebrating Community
Prince was never lacking for fans. Years after he was getting regular radio play, his albums were still charting and his concerts selling out. While existing largely outside the music industry (or within the micro-industry he built), Prince maintained a substantial and remarkably faithful fan base. There aren’t many musicians who can play Madison Square Garden without a record contract. […]
X broke the mold of what a punk band should be. Amid 1970s West Coast zealot savants like Flipper and Germs, X was a talented band versed in multiple styles and with a passion for vocal harmonies. They were also as committed to the cause as any of their upstart peers and through five essential albums held fast to the […]
“Nobro” means just what you think it means, and what you maybe hope it doesn’t. The all-female (no bros) Montreal four-piece might be breaking a logical implication of the Bechdel test – a band without dudes shouldn’t have to talk about them – but that’s already committing too much thought to it. So OK, stop, back up. Nobro rocks […]
The blues, according to B.B. King, is about survival, and if there’s a list of people who know about both the blues and survival, King’s got to be near the top. The blues, we learn from King, isn’t about being beaten down, it’s about getting back up again. Singer Vienna Carroll knows about blues and survival, too. And she knows […]
I’ve been admiring the Lancaster, England, duo the Lovely Eggs from afar for quite some time. They’ve been at it for well over a decade and are perfectly molded for the age of internet-induced attention deficit disorder. Their songs and videos are fast, funny, charming and can serve to work out aggression in a matter of minutes, either by giggles […]
Horse Lords: All Grown Up and Nothing to Prove by Kurt Gottschalk Horse Lords is a complicated beast. A likeable one but, well, it’s complicated. The Baltimore band doesn’t cling to any real notions of rock, but fits snugly alongside Battles, the Books, Zs and other such bands who might not be rock but pretty much are. Their own brand […]
Greg Fox sipped his own mix of green tea, honey and nettles as he spoke from his shared loft in Gowanus in what he describes as being “as professional a situation as a bedroom studio could be.” The large, sunny room is filled with drums and other instruments, recording equipment and the ephemera of the working musician and percussion instructor. […]
Much has rightly been made of the drama surrounding and embedded into David Bowie’s ★, an album that not only addressed mortality but directly addressed his fans as well. Less has been said suggesting that it stood upon its release, as it does today, as one of Bowie’s finest records. Opinions vary, of course, and his back catalog is a […]
Would you let a Butthole Surfer babysit your tween? That seemed to be the question – more of a dare, really – implicit in the advance hype for Gibby Haynes’s first foray into fiction. Not just fiction, mind you. The man who once sang for the most dangerous band in rock had penned a novel for the young adult market, […]
After two very slow pieces for strings, organ and accordion – of which he was not a part – on a December night at Roulette in Downtown Brooklyn, Mick Barr walked onstage gripping his guitar by the neck and addressed the audience with a slight grin, saying simply, “Ear plugs?” He tested the amp with a quick strum, sounding more […]