
Bacon has seemingly become America’s favorite breakfast meat in recent years, with popular sitcom characters regularly expressing a penchant for it (I’m looking at you, Ron Swanson). Big name diners like Denny’s recently started serving "bacon sundaes" on their menu along with a slew of other bacon-centered dishes. Clearly, we’re a country that loves bacon, and Richmond is no different.

They're back! California indie-rock sensation Best Coast, who charmed the city with their excellent set at RVA Music Fest 2011, are crisscrossing the country right now on tour. They'll be bringing their brand of sun-drenched punk/pop back to the river city with a performance at The National on Monday, June 3, and your friends at RVA Mag have the hookup!

Hitting 4000 Instagram followers is not an easy task. It takes a special kind of appreciation for the art form - quick photos of a specific nature, maintaining themes, and more importantly, providing content that people find interesting. But in a social media platform rife with spam-bots and cat photos, Minh V. Le and Natalee Trinh, the owners and stylists at RVA Nails, have achieved the impossible.

Sara Bohannon has a graduate degree in poetry, and goes to a lot of local shows. She was writing show reviews for us for a while, until she got bored with the format. But recently she came up with a new spin on the old formula, so we hereby present the inaugural installment of Sara's haiku show review column, which we will hopefully be running every couple of weeks. Enjoy!

Duane Denison started out studying classical guitar before hitting the scene with The Jesus Lizard, a daring noise band that never really got their due amid the alternative craze that defined the 90s. Denison has also performed with Hank Williams III and Firewater, among others. In 2001, he started Tomahawk, a brazen rock band boasting Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle) on vocals and John Stanier (Helmet, Battles) on drums.

oOoOO--say it with me now: "oh"--a San Francisco based witch house project created by Chris Dexter, is playing at Strange Matter tonight. oOoOO is slow, repetitive, dark, and bassy. Take a listen here...

Rotten Sound is a brutally angry grindcore/death metal band hailing from Vaasa, Finland. On Sunday, Strange Matter will be graced with their remorselessly blistering sound.

Power Trip – Manifest Decimation (Southern Lord Records)
With a few exceptions, most of the really outstanding metal releases this year have owed some serious debts to a variety of bygone eras. Magic Circle evoked Pagan Altar/Candlemass doom, Noisem managed to sound like the follow-up to Seven Churches that Possessed should have written, and Darkthrone once again reinvented themselves, this time as cheap-beer-and-denim speed metal militants. Dallas crossover unit Power Trip are no exception.

I recently ran across an image of the Red Hot Chili Peppers playing Shafer Court in the late 80s and followed the link to VintageRVA. This site is an absolute goldmine of Richmond history.

Aaaand this is why we can't have nice things. Last night at Dominion Riverrock, an annual weekend-long music festival that takes place on Brown's Island, Richmond was lucky enough to witness a headlining set by reggae pioneers Toots And The Maytals--or, well, most of one.