Glancing at the names, one might surmise this is a psycho-core cannibal-metal sickfest. Not quite, as Blood on the Wall is surprisingly more of a raw, quirky, Pixies/Pavement-influenced offering who are fine in their own right. But opener Psychic Ills is the real prize here, featuring hypnotic bass grooves, tasty…
All hail the trout mask replicas of the new bearded age! For the Sunburned Hand of the Man are the New Weird America! Or something like that. All we know is, when these wicked-strange Bostonians roll into town, there might be masks, rainsticks and shambolic neo-beatnik absurdism, but there will…
Japan’s most colorful psyche-rock circus makes its annual Denton visit, just in time to bask in the North Texas rising sun. Sometimes Acid Mothers Temple sounds like 28 guitarists soloing in different rooms, but you haven’t lived until you’ve had a splinter off Kawabata Makoto’s shattered axe hurl inches from…
Thursday, March 30, at the Metrognome Collective
It’s not like John Easdale hadn’t gotten offers before, but this day in early 2004 it was different. After being subjected to a full-court press by the crew of VH1’s Bands Reunited, this time the retired Dramarama frontman decided to unretire. Time for one of the most overlooked bands of…
Somewhere between the naked beauty of Low and the gut-wrenching intensity of the Swans lies Shiny Around the Edges, a husband and wife duo from Denton that likes its songs wrapped in an ear-bending sheath of finely-combed feedback. If the material off their fine Secrets of the Double Blind CD-R…
Joy Division’s Ian Curtis was such a morbidly intense vocalist and personality, it seemed he always had one foot in the grave, even before he hung himself on the eve of the band’s first U.S. tour. You can’t exactly say the same thing about Baboon lead singer Andrew Huffstetler, though…
Matt Pike has finally gotten so stoned, he’s decided to try something different. Pike is the former leader of Sleep, who almost single-handedly carved out the genre known as stoner rock from the remains of Black Sabbath’s fetid carcass. Pike’s current band High On Fire built on 2002’s dominating Surrounded…
Last year, a friend came to me desperate for a proper album to play at his father’s funeral. A stack of suggestions later, the service was graced by a true musical nirvana via the gentle, deliberate drones of Windy & Carl. The Michigan husband-and-wife duo must have planted a fly…
Most people have a natural mental membrane that filters their feelings, thoughts, theories and emotions before spewing them out into the world unchecked. Some don’t. If Mwanza Dover ever had one, it’s long since been overpowered by his boundless passion, restlessness and creativity–not to mention his flair for the dramatic…
O spasmolytic scions of math metal, listen and listen well: Stop-on-a-dime, ADD-driven thrash-skronk doesn’t get heavier or more intense than the Dillinger Escape Plan. Their latest, Miss Machine, may have driven them out of the underground just a tad, having even appeared live on the nu-school Headbangers Ball on MTV2,…
Someone once wrote me a letter with the words “DEATH METAL” in big, bold caps. It might as well have read “DEATH THREAT,” because I had committed an unforgivable sin by labeling the mighty Opeth a black metal band. This is a capital offense in Gothenburg, Sweden, you see, so…
Come celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Acid Mothers Temple! Wait, what the bejeezus is the Acid Mothers Temple? It’s an old-school psychedelic rock collective from Japan led by extreme cosmic shredder Kawabata Makoto. And if things couldn’t get weirder, Acid Mothers Temple and the Cosmic Inferno is the collective’s…
Wolf Eyes is the sound of mangled electronics past the point of repair: crackling, rumbling and smoking wires spewing noxious odes to decay, repressed emotions and the inhuman condition. No wonder Sub Pop was so eager to snatch them up! Last year’s Burned Mind was probably the most adventurous release…
Best not clang the pint glasses during Mono’s lulling, ambient guitar build-ups. Hold ’em too loose and they’ll crash to the ground when the Japanese quartet goes ape with their devastating tension-release tsunamis of sound. Last year’s instrumental Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered and the Sun Shined…
For the latest in Bend Studios’ “An Intimate Evening With” series, it just doesn’t get more intimate than Will Johnson. As powerful as his band Centro-matic is live, there’s something to be said for seeing main man Johnson stripped to the bare-bones birthing ground for his songs, including those of…
For Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, the time has come prematurely. On only their third album, they’ve already gone Starbucks on us, ditching the overdriven fuzz of their first two records in favor of the bluesy acoustic stomps of the new Howl. How this plays out onstage bears watching, as does…
Throughout the ’90s, there was this touring calamity known as Crash Worship–a big drum circle with smeared blood, topless women and usually police, unless their shows happened in the woods, as they often did. Well, you might call Sunburned Hand of the Man the new Crash Worship. Their live spectacles…
If apocalypse rock became a movement after Godspeed You Black Emperor!, L.A.’s Red Sparowes are definitely the next generation, surfing on boatloads of atmospheric dread and bombastic, foreboding riffs on their debut record, At the Soundless Dawn. But when these guys talk about apocalypse rock, they really mean it. “The…
After years of piling druggy, blues-fuzz riffs atop an updated model of the Jesus & Mary Spacemen 3 Motorcycle Club, the Warlocks have finally gotten down to business on Surgery and made the album they’ve always been capable of. The tunes have caught up with the songs; on “It’s Just…
There it is again, that staccato beat copped from Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control,” which is rapidly becoming the “Funky Drummer” of indie dance rock. It’s the pulse behind Windsor for the Derby’s “Empathy for People Unknown,” which harnesses luscious synths and subdued vocal harmonies atop the familiar broken thump…
If you thought there were a lot of wiry, tattooed freaks hanging around the Granada before last March’s Steve Vai show, then you ain’t seen nothing. The American Metal Blast tour has the market cornered on sleazy, L.A. street-level ’80s cock rock, where the voices aren’t too shrill and the…
