Philadelphia singer/songwriter Aaron Livingston, who previously contributed vocals to albums by The Roots and collaborated with prolific producer RJD2 on the album The Abandoned Lullaby, has now rechristened himself Son Little and released the EP Things I Forgot. Son Little has a soul singer’s voice, but his musical interests are absolutely all over the place. […]
Well, poo. I really, really did not want to have to recommend a band called Diarrhea Planet, but I’m convinced it’s the right thing to do. I’m not talking out of stool when I say that their new EP is one of the most fun, reckless, drunk-on-rock records I’ve heard in some time. Just try […]
Last week my social media feed went berserk with the video of the Halloween reunion of Queens of the Stone Age with founding bassist Nick Oliveri at the Los Angeles Forum. It was just a one-off, only the second time they’ve played together in ten years, but it restored the glory of his contributions to […]
A few weeks ago in New York City, Amy and I stumbled upon a Xiu Xiu performance that I had previewed here on the blog back in September, then forgotten to add to our calendar. The performance was called Metal, and hosting space The Kitchen described it this way: Wielding massive hammers, two Thai gold […]
If you grew up more than fifty miles from the US-Canada border, there’s a better than average chance you don’t even know who Sloan is. And that, friends, is a goddamned shame, because that means more than half the US populace is missing out on some of the best rock of the past twenty years; […]
Dream Boys have posted a video for their latest single “Positive Arguments” (a White Iris Records/Ring The Alarm co-release). The video was directed by Jihae Simmons, former lead singer for both The Royal We and Neverever (her band with husband and Dream Boy Wallace Meek), and it features everything you could want in a rock video circa 2014: colored gels, an 8 mm […]
Jose González will release his first record in over seven years in February. It’s called Vestiges and Claws and it’s a heartfelt and intimate collection of folk-y songs. González produced the record himself, partly at his home in Gothenberg, Sweden and partly in a nearby studio. It’s a much more stripped down sound than his […]
No slaves to brevity, Washington DC’s Paperhaus deliver 6:24 of energetic yet hypnotic guitar-driven drone-rock with “Cairo”, the first track of their forthcoming eponymous debut album, due out in February 2015. The full-length Paperhaus is a wildly eclectic collection of songs delivered by several different singers, but the band’s sound is consistently rooted in a […]
Scratch an Intro to Anthropology class, and you’ll get a theory about twins. We human-types, with our varying degrees of scientific knowledge, have long labored to make heads or tails of this dualistic biological phenomenon. If you left it up to pop culture and creepalicious directors like David Cronenberg, you’d be convinced that twins were […]
METAL!!! Don’t let this call to arms frighten you — this isn’t the genre you may remember from the days of Beavis & Butthead. For one thing, the tedious soloing and arena-rock choreography are gone, the gods be praised. Metal’s extremes are now the province of nerdy connoisseurs from all backgrounds, cultures, genders and ages, […]