​It was 1979 and punk was being born again in the glitter-flecked primordial muck of Los Angeles. Late-blooming skinheads and bands like Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and the Germs were bashing the West Coast hardcore scene into shape, using little more than blunt force. For most fans of aggro…

Flyer designed by Michael Tamzil | tamzdesigns.com​In the vaguely menacing gloam of this first dying decade of the 21st century, the people continue to party hard. It’s an obsessive, have-fun-or-die type of mindset that cannot be deterred, no matter the consequences. And to a large extent, Frenchy sensations Guy-Manuel de…

Believe it … There are chimps living among us. And when these wild animals aren’t busy ripping the faces off unwitting citizens, they’re insidiously hard to spot. Cleverly camouflaged in people clothes with their hair cropped and parted smartly down the middle of the skull, they’re shopping in our supermarkets…

Flyer design by Kent Hernandez Sometimes a party isn’t just a party. Sometimes it’s Local Motion, the annual charity electro concert benefiting the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life, organized by Loscar Rodriguez, a.k.a. HenceSoLo, and presented by Lexyn Intelligence and Nocturnal. First launched in February 2006, Local Motion has…

The artist known as Matthew Dear has got some serious (but not too serious) identity issues. I mean, it’s not as if his psychic split is the acid-activated, lock-myself-away-for-30-years-and-die Syd Barrett variety. It’s more that, musically, Dear is way too complex to be merely one man. And so, like a…

Flyer design by Eddie Rosenstock The motto is “Nothin’ but the goods.” And like some punch-drunk baby boxer beating a gong with bare bloody fists, the seven-week-old Champion Sound throwdown brings the noise in a big way. For proof of pure party acumen, just take a quick and dirty MySpace…

A minute ago, still buzzing from the twin highs of payday and a certain psychotropic substance, I had the sudden realization: Green is a very good color. For a second, it seemed like a weird kind of intellectual smoke that meant precisely nothing, just floating past. Then, the rest came:…

As wild admirers of Johnny Cash, Karl Marx, and Pee Wee Herman, the ex-Miami and now Oakland-based outfit Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa makes a skuzzy, avant-garde sound that could be called “kinder commune rockabilly.” But that might be short-selling a crew that’s got as many facets as an LSD-25 trip in…

From the moment local hip hop crew ¡Mayday! got their first DSL hookup, the self-described “sound bombers” have proven themselves to cunning manipulators of modern internet technology. Like a half-feral band of dystopian techno-guerillas, they’ve managed to sidestep the bombed-out remains of the post-Napster music industry — YouTubing, MySpacing, and…

Nothing adds megawatts of hype to a South Florida appearance by tabloid twink Pete Wentz like a last-minute Boca ban. Initially, he and his fellow Fall Out Boys were planning to publicly flash their musical junk from the stage at Mizner Park. But now, their pop-punk exhibitionism has been relocated…