Nashville is called Music City USA, but that appellation doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact on this trio, undoubtedly the most abrasive, amusical band to have ventured forth from that roots-conscious town. Today Is the Day is certainly not without precedent in terms of its basic tone. The group erects a Big…
As much an exercise in self-flagellation as a working band, Red House Painters afforded Ohio-bred, San Francisco-based singer/songwriter Mark Kozelek the latitude to — to paraphrase Mick Jagger’s false offer — take his heart in his hand and pour it all over the stage. Without using the safety net provided by metaphor, Kozelek, a self-professed…
The Toiling Midgets spawned from congress between the Sleepers and Negative Trend, two of the Bay Area’s most avowedly confrontational hardcore bands. Congruous to Flipper (two of whose founders played in Negative Trend), the new quintet boiled its songs down to their most primary elements, reassembling them if the mood struck but often allowing guitar…
Once upon a time, every passing season brought another guitar-slinger with aspirations of being knighted the New Dylan, but it’s hard to recall one able to fill the role as well as this smart-alecky bicoastal expectation-tweaker. Like Dylan, Beck (Hansen) has reinvented his personal history countless times — frequently claiming to be a lower-middle-class yutz…
While Dink would no doubt like to be seen as slightly more aggro heirs to the experimental mantle of such Buckeye antecedents as Pere Ubu and Devo, the Ohio quintet actually has more in common with prehistoric Kent homeboys the James Gang, since its output is basic bar-band boogie retooled for the industrial age. Several…
Despite the sanitization it’s received through the efforts of high-profile technicians like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton and Robert Cray, the blues was meant to be a squalid, severe thing. Red Red Meat may not have hit enough blue notes to convince purists that they played the blues, but there’s no doubting this Chicago aggregation…
Manchester’s Spherical Objects were led by Steve Solamar, a terrible singer with an intensely personal viewpoint. His songs concern typical subject matter, but utter lack of selfconsciousness invests his writing with more openness and introspection than you’re probably hoping to hear. The five Objects of Past and Parcel play simple rock that’s lightweight but pleasant;…
Even though they’re not the most primitive or “authentic” of modern-day garage bands — there’s nary a single one-chord song or bowl haircut among their assets — Bellingham, Washington’s Mono Men are pretty much unparalleled for sheer scope of know-how. Equally proficient in proto-punk, surf and likkered-up R&B, the quartet plays party-rock the old-fashioned way…
If David Lynch were to assemble a hard rock band from scratch, chances are he’d come up with something that sounds a lot like Thin White Rope. The Davis, California-bred group defined its high-lonesome desert-rock with enough metallic edge to get the pulse pounding — and enough ominous surrealism to make the blood run cold.…
The cartoon nihilism proffered by this first-wave Southern California (Reseda, to be exact) punk quartet was so over-the-top that most folks didn’t notice that Fear could play circles around the vast majority of its pogo-friendly peers. (And those who did were generally too caught up in frontman Lee Ving’s facetiously contemptuous buffoonery to tell the…
A blue-collar hero in an art-school world, bassist and working-joe conceptualist Mike Watt has been a titanic presence on the avant-rock scene since the dawn of the ’80s — when he, guitarist D Boon and drummer George Hurley formed the Minutemen. That spectacularly prolific (a dozen records in just five years) band’s heady mélange of…
Over the years, this Seattle (originally from Missoula, Montana and descended from a band called Ein Heit) band has explored some of the headier reaches of post-punk, formulating a tense, austere sound — nurtured by fellow Montana expatriate Steve Albini, who has recorded most of Silkworm’s albums — that falls roughly halfway between the Wedding…
Revered and reviled (both, generally, for all the wrong reasons) by post-mods scattered across many lands, this Minneapolis (but don’t think that reveals anything) trio has consistently chiseled out the most physically and cerebrally assaultive post-hardcore you’ll ever hear. Leader Tom Hazelmyer, who pulled stints in both Otto’s Chemical Lounge and the Marines (not a…
As a second-generation avant-noise provocateur, this crunch-rock-dallying free jazz guitarist has yet to develop the visceral improvisational extravagance shown by dad Peter (the hard-blowing saxophonist who’s recorded with Sonny Sharrock and Bill Laswell in Last Exit). He has, however, demonstrated a heartening willingness to perpetuate the more-is-more attitude synthesized by the raucous proponents of post-Ornette…
When they first appeared on the scene, this Madison, Wisconsin trio wanted folks to believe they were moonshine-swillin’, small mammal-torturin’ dudes who did a lot more than just kiss their cousins. They validated those impressions with a sound reminiscent of the most primitive country blues imaginable impaled on shards of Birthday Party distortion. Having exhausted…
If simplicity is a virtue, then Ethan Buckler must be a saint. The Louisville native (and Squirrel Bait alumnus) has clearly pored over the gospel according to Jonathan Richman, but the manner in which he evolved from nascent noise-rock demigod to prince of the sort of pop that would be as comfortable in a pre-school…
When White Zombie crept into New York’s then-vaunted scum-rock scene, the group was perceived as playing a kitsch in-joke on downtown types by enveloping a standard Birthday Party-via-Blue Cheer sludge onslaught in the gaudiest arena-rock trappings you could buy at the 99-cent store. But despite the art-school background shared by singer Rob Zombie (actually Robert…
Back in the early ’90s, shortly before the concept of being a “slacker” captured the wider imagination of the mainstream, three university-educated young men shared an apartment in New Jersey, paid the bills by working as security guards and spent their spare time pouring bent lyrics and guitar noise into a four-track recorder. While Bob…
Over a half-decade of existence, this fluid-membership gaggle of NYC bohos developed from a marginally less political arm of Mofungo’s Marxist art-terrorism into a sometimes downright goofy jug band for post-mod beatniks. Burn All Your Records might be rough terrain for diehard capitalists to navigate, but the bracing orchestration — employing more than two dozen…
As one component of the legendary MC5, guitarist Wayne Kramer helped create the soundtrack for a revolution that never came — but not for lack of trying. With its proto-metal-cum-free-jazz-scree rock’n’roll, the Five gave voice to the dope, guns and fucking in the streets discourse that exploded from Detroit, homebase of the radical White Panther…
