Nuggets has come to be regarded as one of the most essential, influential compilations of the last century. One element that sets it apart, given the era in which it was assembled, is the fact that it didn’t set out to be a greatest hits of anyone or anything. And while the billing as “Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968” suggests that it surveys a particular type of music, that’s not really the case.
These folks either wrote reviews that appear on the site or wrote for Trouser Press magazine. If anyone listed below cares to E-mail us with a link you’d like added, just let us know. And ditto if anyone is AWOL from this list. Grant AldenDavid AntrobusJem AswadTroy J. AugustoMichael AzerradCary BakerMichael BakerEmily BeckerSeth BenderJohn BergstromArt…
Why do I write about music? Why does anyone? I’ve given that question a lot of thought and I have discerned subliminal motives that are less than flattering. On one hand, it’s the desire to share what moves me, to offer the benefit of serious consideration and historical knowledge to the young and curious. On a deeper level, however, it springs from a desire to be accepted and appreciated, to establish standing in the world that I hungered for as a child.
Though they would eventually achieve tremendous commercial success, 10,000 Maniacs seemed like unlikely candidates for mainstream stardom at the start of their recording career. The eclectic sextet from the remote upstate New York burg of Jamestown originally drew inspiration from an unpredictable array of influences, from folk to punk to reggae, an approach that’s reflected…
Latter-day rock’n’roll revolutionaries have shown a marked tendency towards swift burnout. They reveal their raw vision to the world, but the world, being the philistine place that it is, turns away; the musicians move on. Sonic Youth, unlike so many of the noise bands that formed in New York at the beginning of the ’80s,…
These New Jerseyites are the stuff of legend and cults. Led by guitarists Glenn Mercer and Bill Million (originally featuring future avant-star drummer Andy Fisher, aka Anton Fier), the Feelies dressed like nerdy preppies and paid only passing attention to the conventional demands of rock and roll. Even during the original band’s period of highest…
Chicago’s Naked Raygun was one of the encouraging new punk bands that bloomed in the Midwest long after thrash had apparently isolated the punk aesthetic in its own circumscribed ghetto, where it would never again challenge the musical values of regular folk. Lump the longer-running Raygun in with Hüsker Dü, Man Sized Action, Big Black…
Like most of the bands implicated in the West Coast psychedelic revival (the paisley underground, if you will), Rain Parade has a better ear for style than for substance. Most of the genre’s bands tend to make very deft, subtle music but have nothing to say; Rain Parade at least knows the nuances of form…
San Pedro, California’s greatest musical export clearly understood the concept of brevity. The trio’s albums and EPs pack an astonishing number of songs, most of which (on the early releases, at least) clock in at under a minute. In that brief time, they took apart rock, jazz and funk and put the pieces back together…
Game Theory, the songwriting vehicle for Northern California native and pop-eclectician Scott Miller, was a clean, and for a time, mildly psychedelic, pop band from northern California, whose departures from conventional meat-and-potatoes reality were more quirky than trippy. Although sometimes lumped in with Los Angeles’ Paisley Undergrounders like the Three O’Clock, Game Theory was more…
There are few experiences in this life that leave one feeling as sullied as a spin through the grooves of a Butthole Surfers record. Unlike so many nouveau scuzzbos, Austin’s Buttholes don’t descend into the depths of squalor to make a point about the human condition — they just like it down there. Splotches of…
Calling the Honeymoon Killers’ debut disc a bad album is about as informative as calling Catch a Fire a reggae record: it’s just a generic description. This New York four-piece (not to be confused with the Belgian band named after the same 1970 psychotronic cinema classic) is firmly rooted in the aesthetics of the splatter…
For a brief period in late winter 1984/5, you couldn’t leave your house or turn on your radio in New York without hearing some rapper going on about a girl named Roxanne. There was “Roxanne’s Revenge,” “The Real Roxanne,” “Roxanne You’re Through,” “Roxanne’s Mother,” “Roxanne’s Brother,” “Roxanne’s Doctor” — even “Roxanne’s a Man.” Demonstrating the…
Hüsker Dü emerged from the punk rock scene; vast improvements in songwriting over the years may have changed the shape of their music, but they never lost their firm attachment to bracing, loud guitar rock. Although failing to achieve the mainstream success of R.E.M. or even the Replacements, the often exhilarating Minneapolis trio was hugely…
Trouble Funk belongs to Washington DC’s go-go scene. Go-go is a throwback to percussive, endless-groove funk that sacrifices structure, production and slickness for loose feeling and community involvement. The bands — basically fluid rhythm sections with a few added frills — do their thing while the musicians and audience yell a whole lot of nonsense…
The Nihilistics were a stupid, obnoxious hardcore band from Long Island, New York. Their lyrics were predictable banalities, and their attitudinizing was irritating. That’s the bad news. The good news: the Nihilistics album is pretty good (even if the preceding five-song 7-inch — which was later appended to the debut album and reissued as 13th…
Milwaukee’s Die Kreuzen was simultaneously one of the most thrilling and conservative exponents of American hardcore. While many quality thrash bands have escaped the genre’s brutally circumscribed conventions by delving into metal, psychedelia, funk or bohemianism, this quartet played punk strictly by the book. Cows and Beer, a six-song 7-inch debut (all of which is…
Steve Albini has had a genuine impact on the rock cosmos. In the ’80s, as leader of Big Black and Rapeman, the Chicago singer/guitarist ushered in an era of malevolent detachment; as an extraordinarily prolific producer (or, as he insists on putting it, “recorder” or “engineer”) of bands as varied as Jesus Lizard, the Pixies,…
This clean-cut quintet from Staten Island, New York (MD stands for “musical diversity”) sets classic black vocal-group harmonies to a streetwise hip-hop beat. They rap occasionally, but even with the old Sugar Hill rhythm section (Keith LeBlanc, Doug Wimbish and Skip McDonald, aka Tackhead) providing the backing on Love Letters, they’re too sugary to throw…
Chicago’s Bonemen of Barumba go tribal on a Pop Group-type dissonant art-funk jones. The music moves and grooves on heavy tom-toms locked to an extremely profundo basso. Guitars slice in alternately clichéd and inventive noisy lines, and Mark Panick screams and chants over the top. Driving the Bats is ballsy and primitive; the record’s power…
