The Nashville way of making music is unlike any other, comparable only to the studio system of Hollywood’s golden age — a closed system of songwriters, producers, record labels, and artists that creates most of the sounds you don’t want to admit you listen to on the radio when no…
Hey, dude. So here’s my mixtape that’s been 12 months in the making. Sorry it’s taken a while, but reality often moves at the same molten pace as a couple of the bands culled here. While the new folksters get accolades for their freaky psychedelic tendencies, there’re plenty of heavy…
Recordings of DJ mixes have been multiplying like e-mail spam over the past decade. The sheer volume of said releases is overwhelming, and it makes one wonder: Who the hell is buying them? There must be a demand if labels keep issuing the things as if the music industry has…
In 2006, the pop singles market continued to dominate, in no small part because the pick-to-click-driven mentality of online music stores and ringtone sites gave consumers unparalleled freedom to choose their own musical adventure. What suffered in the meantime, though, was the quality of pop/rock albums. These platters frequently spawned…
This story, as originally conceived, was supposed to be a compilation of the year’s best boxed sets and other reissues. But then it hit us — in today’s shuffle-driven iPod world, with the pace of pop culture moving at breakneck speed, it’s pointless to make such temporal distinctions. The past…
Clearly nobody needs a primer on indie rock. We all have our own idea of what it is, right? Still, why is it that so few of us can agree on who deserves such a designation? Fact is, trying to define indie rock universally is as futile a task as…
Remember the first time you heard the Pixies classic “Where Is My Mind?” It condensed the euphoria of cutting anchor and sailing into the abyss into a four-minute pop song. Now Jay Reatard (that Memphis garage punker from the Lost Sounds, the Retards, Angry Angles, and probably a dozen other…
Gwen Stefani is still pushing the limits of ridiculousness on The Sweet Escape; after all, it takes a person quite secure in her self-confidence to bring back yodeling as a viable chorus hook. But the aforementioned von Trapp-fest (“Wind It Up”) is actually the worst song on her second solo…
As is readily apparent from the name itself, imadethismistake operates from a somewhat tenuous perspective, a place where trauma and uncertainty seem to reign supreme. Kylewilliam Campol, the primary mistakemaker, offers up a heartbroken narrative recapping a bittersweet farewell to a dying lover (“Staring Blindly Into a Dull Sunset”) and…
Wendy O. Williams always said she liked to make “aggressive art,” and that’s what she did as the front woman for ’80s punk-metal band the Plasmatics — sporting a Mohawk on TV, wearing nothing but electrical tape over her nipples, blowing up luxury cars and school buses, cutting guitars in…
For nearly a decade, the giants of electronic dance music, a cold-blooded cadre mostly from northern Europe, lumbered across the Earth. Tiësto, Paul Van Dyk, Paul Oakenfold, Seb Fontaine, Judge Jules, and Fatboy Slim dominated small suburban dance floors and Ibizan caverns alike with crafty disco assembled from chest-rattling basslines…
Two months ago, I came across a MySpace group for the Foundation, the long-defunct West Palm Beach club that was the hub of underground music in Palm Beach County (groups.myspace.com/foundationnightclub). But what began as simple cyber nostalgia soon spawned a real-life reunion (or, as MySpace heads call it, a meet-up)…
Sometime back in 1980, keyboardist Thomas Morgan Robertson — nicknamed “Dolby” due to his extensive audio expertise — was enjoying a good gig as a session synth player. After a night with Bruce Wooley and the Camera Club, a proto new-wave outfit, Dolby stole away for a few hours in…
Christmastime is here. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Here comes Santa Claus. We’ve all heard it before, and we don’t need to hear it again. Before you plan a holiday bash or go on a three-hour road trip, burn a mix of these fresh holiday tunes. Winter…
When Swedish death-metal band Arch Enemy announced in 2001 that original singer Johan Liiva had been asked to leave because guitarist Michael Amott wanted “a more dynamic frontman,” few people expected that the new “frontman” would be a woman — a then-unknown German singer named Angela Gossow. Since Gossow joined…
The Twilight Singers’ A Stitch in Time features two of the past decade’s great voices: ex-Afghan Whig Greg Dulli and former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan. And while Dulli steers the ship (more a rotating cast than an actual band), this EP sees Lanegan finally seizing more control. Transforming Massive…
The Game rose to fame with help from Dr. Dre, who godfathered 2005’s The Documentary, a smash that featured cameos by 50 Cent. But a feud with 50 was followed by the sudden end of the Game’s label deal — a split that indicates with whom Dre sided. As a…
Ah, the mid-’90s pop-punk boom… remember that? Probably not, now that the genre’s nearly synonymous with emo. But there was a time when everyone was more in touch with their Ramones roots. At the forefront were bands like the Riverdales, a group comprising three-fourths of Screeching Weasel (which was pretty…
Truckstop Coffee is a good enough live band — it’s the reason the Palm Beach County quartet gets booked to play all those Honeycomb.com-sponsored street parties in West Palm. But even so, TSC through a live PA system isn’t the same as TSC recorded. One Damn Thing to Redeem is…
We’re all familiar with this story: local band gets a decent following, signs to a major, and moves to New York (or Austin or L.A.). Some of these bands do well. Most do not, getting dropped by their label after a few months before disbanding. Still, whether such a band…
The brainchild of Kansas-born, Brooklyn-residing singer/cellist Melora Creager, Rasputina is like an Edward Gorey wet dream come to life: a captivating combination of chamber music, doomy goth-metal textures, corsets lifted from a Victorian boudoir, and loads of twisted black humor. An in-demand session cellist who’s worked with Nirvana, Bob Mould,…
Although Army of Anyone features half of Stone Temple Pilots (as well as former Filter lead singer Richard Patrick), the whole isn’t greater than the sum of its parts. None of the tracks on the group’s debut smolders quite like Filter’s mid-’90s breakthrough, “Hey Man, Nice Shot,” nor does any…
