Ron Asheton, The Stooges, “TV Eye” (1970): It can be easy to forget that simple is often best. Ron Asheton has one good idea in “TV Eye,” a pentatonic riff in Am. He plays like 40 times in a row, as Iggy Pop hoots, wails, and tries to eat the microphone. When the song needs […]
“How the fuck do you learn this shit?” That’s me, trying to wrap my head around John Zorn’s 1990 masterpiece of jazz, no wave, film soundtrack, and grindcore, Naked City. One moment the six-piece is ripping through the “Batman Theme”, the next they’re bebopping through the French Quarter, the next they’re screeching through a blast […]
How much does production matter? Before Martin Hannett recorded their debut Unknown Pleasure, Joy Division sounded like every other band that formed because they saw a Sex Pistols’ concert: yelled vocals, barre chord guitars, sloppy musicianship, you know, punk rock. You can hear this embryonic band on the first two tracks of the compilation Substance, […]
Demilich’s guitarist/vocalist Antti Boman has a bizarre throat. I don’t mean that he makes weird sounds with it (which he does), I mean that it is physically different than your throat or mine. His singing sounds like a close-mic’d gastrointestinal tract trying to digest an entire Meat Lovers pizza. Boman gurgles, groans, and bellows in […]
You did it. You wrote the songs. You went to open mics. You harvested band members. You finally found a bassist. You got the band together. You KEPT the band together. You sent out emails with cell phone recordings of practice to book gigs. You played to people’s backs in a bar, to ten people […]
Last week we talked about how in the 1980s hardcore punk and metal were kissing cousins and should probably just fuck already. Peanut butter and chocolate, baby! Today we’re talking about more misshapen genre collisions. In the 1970s, the hard rock band Carmen smashed together prog and flamenco. It sounds every bit as weird as […]
Nick Cave is special. While his fellow 80s cohorts are playing the hits on revival circuits, he’s still churning through the grist of his day-to-day existence and creating art out of it. He’s the rare celebrity that has grown wise instead of just old. Nowhere is that more apparent than on his website, theredhandfiles.com, where […]
Although the metal world has somewhat opened up to newcomers and outsiders over the last decade, for most of its existence, the subculture was gate-kept by self-appointed arbiters of “real metal” and “true fans.” These Comic Book Guys in jean jackets wanted to keep their fandom pure, which usually meant they only wanted to surround […]
FOUR PILLARS OF A ROCK BAND: SONGS: The best shows fade into memory, but the records are here for the long haul. Chuck Berry is “Maybelline.” The Beatles are “She Loves You.” Amy Winehouse is “Rehab.” To this day, Foreigner tours, even though its guitarist is the sole remaining member of the band (and […]
One hour. One song. This album had to happen someday and it was probably going to be made by a band whose members regularly smoked a metric shit ton of weed. Sleep’s Dopesmoker probably isn’t the most famous stoner/doom metal album. (That’s probably Electric Wizard’s Dopethrone.) And they didn’t originate the genre. (That would probably […]