Siouxsie and the Banshees’ debut album The Scream (1978) is a beautiful rash of music and personal moment of clarity for yours truly, a rite of passage if you will. It scratches and burns with reckless fury, hammering drums and a snarling, brutal style that scares the shit out of most parents. It was also [...]

Eat your heart out Jonny Greenwood. That is indeed Keith Richards in Mario Shifano’s 1969 film Umano non Umano. + Download DRM free music via eMusic’s 35 free MP3 no risk trial offer ____________________________________________________________________________________

What I find really appealing, not to mention refreshing, about Our Boy Roy, a garage rock tribute to Roy Orbison, is that it puts the music first. The songs first. It would be very easy (and predictable) to to treat such a project with kid gloves—an all too precious ode to a legend, carefully tip-toeing [...]

I first caught the Cramps on a humid day in the summer of 1992. It was bizarre, unconventional, amazing and above all else, eye-opening.  In the span of their set I saw the band mix up Buddy Holly, Johnny Thunders, Link Wray and the Ramones; turn it on its head and spin it into some [...]

Four albums into their career as one of the most accidental of “super-groups,” the New Pornographers seemed to have hit a bump. While Challengers was a solid record, it wasn’t nearly the equal of its predecessor, the near-perfect Twin Cinema, and the interim between albums had seen masterful releases from both A.C. Newman and Dan [...]