There is a small, forgotten gem of a short story by Fritz Leiber, an industrial-era tall tale called “Gonna Roll the Bones.” The hero, Joe Slattermill, is a broken-down ore miner with a born gift for precision throwing. One night when he feels the pressure inside him building to the…
Let’s say you’re a young person, maybe between the ages of 19 and 26, and you’ve finished school and you’ve moved to a new city and you’re happily in the process of finding your way around the world, maybe working a job, maybe not, maybe riding a bike, maybe driving…
Todd Lewis and Taz Bentley probably could have interested a bigger label in their new project, The Burden Brothers. After all, Lewis was, until last August, the front man for the Toadies, and for years Bentley supplied the big beat for Reverend Horton Heat. Instead, fed up with the bureaucracy…
The title of Lucy Loves Schroeder’s album says it all: Lucy is a Band. Lucy is not the name of the woman who sings and plays guitar on the majority of the songs. Schroeder is not the bass player, the drummer, Lucy’s boyfriend or, like the Peanuts characters they’re named…
Mark Stuart’s laundry is done. He knows, because some guy he doesn’t know just came outside and told him to get his socks the hell out of the dryer. “It’s all about the glamour,” Stuart says wryly. “The rock-and-roll lifestyle.” Scratch a rock and roller with clean skivvies and find…
Alicia Keys is so 2001’s Lauryn Hill: a young, beautiful, smart African-American woman with more talent than the white critical community knows how to handle, pushed to the lip of the mainstream media stage by editors and producers grateful for the chance to chip away at their guilt over never…
The four members of Los Angeles-based System of a Down are the unlikely architects of a twisted new prog-rock schematic. Their quirky time signatures and complicated instrumental arrangements make their music a little difficult to embrace upon first listen. (Give their audience credit for remembering to take their Ritalin.) Pay…
Our short attention spans have rendered her an afterthought, no less so because Sara Hickman long ago (or was it last month?) stepped off the 500X and Club Dada stages and moved to Austin, where all the pretty folk and folkies go sooner or later. But just because she’s out…
Don’t know about you, but I’m personally counting the days till an emo star ends up on Oprah. At a small club gig in New York City a couple of weeks ago, Rainer Maria guitarist Kyle Fischer opened his set by thanking a dozen or so people (by name and…
On February 2, Rich Soul got in bed next to his wife, Renee. Their son Julian was in his room asleep. None of this was out of the ordinary for the young family. What happened next, sadly, was; Rich Soul never woke up, passing away quietly during the night. He…
So, OK, yes, I spent more nights last year standing with my arms crossed in rock clubs than standing with my arms crossed in dance clubs (and still more nights than that sitting cross-legged at home watching Law & Order). But even if the paradigmatic shift that was supposed to…
Fifteen years ago, Justin Broadrick helped create one of the most intense, groundbreaking death metal albums ever. Now, he’s co-created one of the most intense, groundbreaking hip-hop albums in recent memory. What gives? Broadrick, who drifted out of Napalm Death after its debut, Scum, to found the dense industrial group…
It’s never really mattered who’s dropped by to lend a hand in the studio; as long as Anders Parker is in the house, so is Varnaline. The band, both a legitimate group and a de facto one-man operation, rose from the ashes of Space Needle six years ago, with drummer…
“The way I see it,” Loudon Wainwright III says from his California home, “all I’m really doing is reporting what’s going on with me, although obviously I’m aware that what happens to me happens to other people. I’ve always written a lot about what was going on in my life…
The natives are restless in Omaha. With their Great Plains indie-rock empire well in hand, the luminaries of Nebraska’s Saddle Creek records are turning their attention outward to the problems and hypocrisies afflicting this country and its questionable leadership. Leading the charge is Conor Oberst. To do so, Saddle Creek…
If anyone happened to catch MTV’s Total Request Live last week (whoooo!), then you might have seen Corn Mo, doing what only Corn Mo can. Apparently, on Monday, as Corn Mo (Jon Cunningham to his parents and anyone who doesn’t feel like using his stage name) was bringing home his…
After one listen to N.E.R.D.’s debut, I immediately thought of something Mos Def told Spin awhile back, when the magazine gave him a chance to right the rap-rock wrongs of the past few years. Forget the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of, “Fred Durst so wants…
We would speak today of Edgar Allan Poe’s Man of the Crowd, who so hated himself that he couldn’t stand to be left alone. We would speak of Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, who told his audience the truth about themselves, and was reviled for it. Further: We would speak of…
Slayer isn’t just a band; it’s a precision killing machine. Death is always the hot topic, and they seem to be experts on the subject. Homicide, genocide, suicide. Whatever floats your boat. Slayer kills. Shit is for real. Unless you’re willing to risk life and limb for a rock-and-roll night…
If Wednesday’s The Gloria Record/Her Space Holiday/Ides of Space show at Gypsy Tea Room is proof that indie rock as a sociocultural entity has moved beyond the raw materials of guitars and drums and such to embrace a postmodern sensibility in which artists are inclined to consider their own creative…
When the Breeders formed back in the late ’80s as a side project for then-Pixies bassist Kim Deal and then-Throwing Muses guitarist Tanya Donelly, their supergroup status negated the necessity of playing very many small club gigs. Even when Donelly left the band in 1992 and was replaced by Deal’s…
Where do punk rockers go to die? Or at least to mellow? If the paths of more than a handful of young guys who used to thrash about with guitars and provocative haircuts are any indication, the answer is their inner hard drives. Marc Bianchi, the human behind the computer-love…
