Photo: Gary Isaacs This past spring, Slim Cessna’s Auto Club released Cipher, the act’s fantasic follow-up to 2004’s The Bloudy Tenant Truth Peace. Aside from being the outfit’s most definitive piece of work, the album sports some really cool looking, cryptic artwork, including indecipherable song titles on the jacket –…
Local grindcore band Zombie Hate Brigade are a clever bunch who clearly love and know the zombie mythos. They not only produced the amazing zombie Johnny Cash shirt pictured on the left (this is the back, the front says zombie in block letters — I wear mine often), they’ve also…
After a few years hiatus, Marty Jones is returning to the stage with a new batch of tunes. At 9 p.m. on Saturday, December 6, at the Skylark, Jones and a new group of players — Zach Boddicker, Scott Johnson and Clay Bielman — will unveil a 45-minute set of…
Just stumbled across this gem on the Smoking Gun (via the Daily Swarm). This just in: If you ever find yourself at a karaoke bar in River Falls, Wisconsin, and you think you’re gonna be slick and try your hand at a song by Dio, you better not fuck around…
As you may have gathered from the hi-dive post below, I’m about to head out of town this weekend. Taking a road trip to the West Coast for the holiday. Before heading into the office this morning, I picked up my rental car. The station was set to 104.3 the…
File under OMFG, muhahahah!: Thanks to You (no, not you, silly — that’s the band’s name) is currently plastered on the front page of PureVolume.com, an impressive nod for a local band that most of you probably haven’t even heard of yet. Getting that kind of national exposure is certainly…
Five years? Seriously, has it already been five years since the hi-dive opened? Great scott, man, I guess it has. Wow, time really does fly, eh? Since we’re leaving town around closing time on Friday night (well, Saturday morning, if you want to split hairs), it’s doubtful that we’ll be…
Hey, cats and kittens, got ten bucks? Dig Dressy Bessy? Want to be the envy of every discriminating pop fan in your neighborhood? Than you better high tail it over to the Kindercore Shop with a quickness. There’s a limited (we’re presuming they’re limited, anyway) number of white vinyl copies…
All right, just when you thought things couldn’t get any more redamndiculous for 3OH!3, they have. Following last week’s appearance on Last Call with Carson Daly (clip posted after the jump), comes news that’s likely to further stir the ire of naysayers. We’ve just learned that Nate and T-Pain have…
Since the beginning, there’s always been an element of rebellion attached to making rock and roll. Rarely, however, has such defiance meant facing jail time, paying fines or being publicly flogged. “Our Iranian culture is very conservative, so you either have to grow up to be a doctor or an…
Charlie Parker’s “Billie’s Bounce” isn’t that hard — the melody is pretty simple, and it’s blues in the key of F — but I was struggling with the tune on my tenor sax while sitting in at El Chapultepec (1962 Market Street). I’d only been playing the horn for about…
Few bass players possess the intensity and stage presence of former Cephalic Carnage bassist Jawsh Mullen. And for his part, Devon Rogers has been equally commanding and powerful behind the drums, keeping time for acts as diverse as Register, Hemi Cuda and Reverend Dead Eye. Munimula (due at 3 Kings…
Glochids, Puppet Sampler KeyboardSwee (Distant Colony Records). Though largely a kind of musique concrète, it sounds as though the composers of this effort watched their share of Gus Van Sant and Larry Clark movies and thought they could write better, more haunting incidental music. The minimalist tapestry of electronic sounds…
If you want to relive the days when you wore oversized pants and candy necklaces, waved glow sticks in everyone’s face and popped pills like tomorrow would never come, you could do a lot worse than heading down to the Church this Thursday, November 20, to catch Commander Tom. The…
Singer-songwriter Matt Morris got his start as a Mouseketeer alongside Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. After spending his early teen years apprenticed to the Mouse, he returned to his native Denver to attend John F. Kennedy High School. These days, he’s an accomplished singer-songwriter who’s co-written tunes with Aguilera and…
When he’s asked to describe his home town of Augusta, Georgia, Dead Confederate singer/guitarist Hardy Morris responds with a single word: “Golf” — a reference to the Masters, a tournament that’s defined the community since the 1930s. Still, Morris admits that even in his youth, the competition never interested him…
Everybody knows AC/DC doesn’t change much; it tweaks its basic sound from album to album, and that’s about it. This time around, producer Brendan O’Brien makes the group sound like live humans playing music in a room rather than gods hurling riffs like thunderbolts from the sky. They’re funkier and…
Her Pinkness likely had no idea that the Stooges used Fun House as the moniker for a genius 1970 album — but the fact that this possibility can’t be entirely ruled out demonstrates why she’s several cuts above the average popster. She’s grown increasingly confident with each passing album, and…
Reliability. It’s underrated. Who even thinks about a car that starts every time? Until the one time it doesn’t. AC/DC is like that. The band rocks. And that’s all it does. The music isn’t complicated. It’s Phil Rudd’s simple drumming. It’s Cliff Williams’s straightforward bass lines. It’s Malcolm Young’s utilitarian…
Diverse, surprising albums and an explosive, engaging live show are the hallmarks of Apollo Sunshine, a trio of friends — Sam Cohen, Jesse Gallagher and Jeremy Black — who met at the Berklee College of Music the better part of a decade ago. The group has drawn comparisons to artists…
Although essentially following the glam-metal trend of the ’80s, the members of Lizzie Borden never embarrassed themselves as egregiously as many of their contemporaries. Instead of draping simperingly saccharine pop in faux-gender-bending rock-satyr guise, the group opted for the harder-edged rock and visually engaging live shows embodied by bands like…
Incubus bassist Ben Kenney isn’t letting the band’s year-long hiatus keep him out of the studio or off the road. The former Roots guitarist is keeping himself plenty busy pushing his latest solo album, Distance and Comfort, on which he wears all the hats as producer, mixer, writer and performer:…
