Pile destroyed a sold-out Lost Lake on Monday night. Energized by a sweaty crowd packed dick-to-ass, the four-piece tore through a decade and a half of material with the ferocity of a punk band playing a basement show. I shouldn’t have expected anything less. “They are great live,” my friend Leo Gallery of Owosso said […]
It takes a real megalomaniac to list their own record in a column that celebrates Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, St. Vincent’s self-titled, and Sly and the Family Stone’s Greatest Hits. But I’m not here to celebrate greatness. This week’s Heck Record column about Part Time Ghost’s Songs of Death and Love is an exercise in […]
Pavement released their second album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain on Valentine’s Day of 1994. Less than two months later Kurt Cobain killed himself. I think a lot of the critical energy that would’ve gone toward the next Nirvana release landed on Pavement’s slack shoulders. At the end of the year, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain earned […]
Listen to “You’re Killing Me” off of Pavement’s 1989 debut EP Slay Tracks: 1933–1969. You wouldn’t expect this drumless, duel-guitar squall – more static than song – to be the first brick in the career of one of the most beloved bands of the 1990s. Pavement is a shoo-in for indie rock’s Mt. Rushmore. Two […]
The Band – the cocky hotshots called themselves “The Band,” although they explain it away in a Canadianly self-effacing way in the documentary – began their career first as the backing group for Ronnie Hawkins and then Bob Dylan, before becoming acclaimed headliners themselves after the release of 1968’s Music from Big Pink and ‘69’s […]
Last week we covered Radiohead, a group who somehow incorporated dozens of influences into a single band. Today, we’re looking at a group who distilled the essence of a single influence, Black Sabbath, into a hyper-concentrate for their own band, Electric Wizard. Electric Wizard is for people who think Sabbath’s riffs are too fast and […]
This week I re-listened to Radiohead’s first album Pablo Honey, made when singer Thom Yorke and company were 20-year-old babies, and I was surprised how it leapt from the speakers. It’s not an underrated classic, but it’s certainly not the dismissible dreck the band seem to believe it to be. It’s a middle-tier Britpop album. […]
Last weekend, Nic and I went on a band field trip to watch some metal. A loaded bill at the Mission Ballroom saw Converge, Sanguisugabogg, Khemmis, and Suicide Cages opening for The Dillinger Escape Plan, who were reuniting with their original singer, Dimitri Minakakis. “You guys having fun?” Minakakis asked the audience. “Fuck your fun.” […]
Heck Records couldn’t let the Prince of Darkness ride off to conquer Hell without an appreciation post. After Lars Ulrich, Ozzy Osbourne is the most important person in this history of metal. I’m kidding. Ozzy is number two, but only next to his Black Sabbath bandmate Tony Iommi. Iommi was the first person to build […]
My buddy Bob Cosmo recently asked me for a list of my favorite albums from last year. He’s a DJ for KGNU and does a good job keeping up on the new-new. I’m less good at that. Partially, it’s because I am an old, in that I don’t subscribe to a streaming service, and, thus, […]