Music
Localized – Chainwhip, Handicapitalist and Stark Raving Mad
Saturday, April 14, come get your face electrocuted with wide-ranging, pumping punk from Stark Raving Mad and irreverent ’80s hardcore from Handicapitalist at Urban Lounge. Chainwhip will melt the skin off of your face as they open the show with their screechy hardcore crust. Five bucks, punk as fuck, 21-plus for blood n’ pus. … read more
A Therapy Session with Eligh
A few days before the show on March 24 at Urban Lounge, I got a chance to sit down with Eligh over the phone to chat about the album, his first solo headlining tour with Amp Live and his long standing relationship with hip hop. … read more
Napalm Flesh: Nevertanezra, Burn Your World, Merlins Beard
This week, Napalm Flesh offers up a trio of local talent spotlights covering just about all metal fans’ discernable palates, with interviews from Nevertanezra, Burn Your World and Merlins Beard. Also on tap are reviews of Fester, Seas Will Rise and Xerxes … read more
White Rabbits lead singer Stephen Patterson interview 03.09
Chances are you have heard the Brooklyn-based band, White Rabbits, before, and you just didn’t realize it. The band’s hit song, “Percussion Gun,” from their 2009 sophomore album, It’s Frightening, was everywhere on the Internet, as well as TV. Earlier this month, the band released their third album, Milk Famous, and made an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman. In a recent interview with SLUG, the band’s lead singer, Stephen Patterson, talked about the new album, touring and South by Southwest. … read more
Chompin’ Candy Coated Vicodin with Xray Eyeballs
I first encountered Brooklyn’s Xray Eyeballs last October during CMJ. Moments before they took the stage, I met lead singer and guitarist O.J. San Felipe as he was trying to sort out the bar tab for his band. I asked what band he was in and he enthusiastically responded “Xray Eyeball!” with a noticeable accent. Five minutes later, he and his three stunningly beautiful band mates (San Felipe is currently the only male member of the band) took the stage. … read more
New Label, New Sound: Ceremony Gets a Clean Cage
Zoo, twelve cuts of tuneful despondency, finds the band stretching beyond their “razor-to-the-throat” approach, listlessy incoporating strains of surf, post-punk and goth into their acrid blend of melody and bleakness. While the approach can whip Internet hardcore kids into a snotty-nosed, finger-pointing frenzy, guitarist Anthony Anzaldo says it’s just part of the biz. “We don’t go into the songwriting process and say, ‘Hey, let’s not write fast parts.’ It’s really not a conscious thing.” … read more
Xiu Xiu: Noise Pop, Sex Cams and Water Play
Xiu Xiu has been a facet of the indie music scene for nearly a decade, and has never ceased to be interesting. With work that ranges from morose and purposefully uncomfortable, to noise pop masterwork, Xiu Xiu continues to build a following. With their newest album, Always, coming out March 6, singer/songwriter Jamie Stewart set aside some time to discuss the album, piracy and water play. … read more
Earth: Angels/Demons
In the world of heavy metal, the music of Earth has become legendary. The deafening style of drone doom pioneered by Dylan Carlson in the early ’90s helped to shape an entire subset of metal. But if one were to blindly listen to Earth’s recent aural offerings, metal would not come to mind. “I’ve always thought of genres as something the audience or the marketers place on you,” says Carlson. “To me it’s always just been rock n’ roll, and that’s enough.” … read more
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Andrew Jackson Jihad: Optimism Through Pessimism
The music of Andrew Jackson Jihad often casts its gaze upon the darkest parts of humanity. The songs on Knife Man, their most recent album, deal with homelessness, selfishness, laziness, murder, hopelessness and more, but vocalist and guitarist Sean Bonnette doesn’t see his band as the ultimate bummer machine they appear to be. “I consider myself and our band to be pretty optimistic,” Bonnette says. … read more
Caustic Curators: Red Light Sound’s Five-Year Anniversary
This March, Tia Martinez and Jared Russell will celebrate five years of their label, Red Light Sound. Through trials and adversity, the couple has pressed on to showcase auditory art in limited-edition, analog pressings to generate a sense of the value of the music they help produce. Their purpose is to reclaim music as “more of an art piece in the actual product itself,” as Russell puts it. … read more