Jordan Reinecke, otherwise known as REIN, was supposed to meet me at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens on a beautiful late Spring Day. Earlier in the week, however, smoke came down from Canada. It was an onslaught of wildfire fumes. Due to both of us having asthma,...
Tenement is a three-piece noisy pop punk band from a small town in Wisconsin called Appleton. Guitar player and vocalist Amos Pitsch is probably the most talented musician you’ve never heard of. Scorching solos work their way into catchy, riffy hooks with gruff, lo-fi vocals that make me think of what it would be like if the Kinks had been a...
Sundials - The First Six Songs (Self-Released) The sheer fact that a band like Sundials calls Richmond, Virginia their home brings a smile to my face. Sundials is a band that predicates itself on having fun and reflecting on passing years. Their flickering memories are littered with familiar faces and good times. Throughout The First Six Songs,...
Richmond ragers Municipal Waste have just released a new video for their song "Acid Sentence," from last year's Massive Aggressive LP (Earache Records). With its combination of slasher mayhem and thrashing madness, it looks like the best video you'd see on any given episode of Headbanger's Ball circa 1990--except a lot gorier. Therefore, it's...
Avenged Sevenfold - Nightmare (Warner Bros) When Avenged Sevenfold started, their James Hetfield-ian vocal mannerisms helped their take on metalcore stand out in a cookie-cutter scene. Since then, though, they've followed in Metallica's footsteps in all the wrong ways. This new album is their Load, and I mean that in the most negative sense...
Talk Is Poison - Rage To Infinity (Self-Released) The late ‘90s weren’t exactly a creative pinnacle for hardcore. Many of the bands who had created the best material of the previous decade had either broken up (Los Crudos, His Hero Is Gone) or started turning out subpar material in an attempt to curry favor with larger crowds (Integrity). A great...
"On the internet, there is no real underground anymore. So if you wanted to create an underground for yourself, the first thing you might do is generate a sort of lexical darknet by using keyterms search engines can’t parse."--Warren Ellis Genre neologisms piss me off. They're invariably used as the hook for a trend piece based around bands whose...
Charles Manson – Air (Magic Bullet Records) To review a new Charles Manson album in 2010 without certain preconceptions is a difficult, and perhaps impossible, prospect. Four decades of revulsion, adoration, and every type of sociological and psychological speculation imaginable have turned Manson into a living symbol – to his detractors, an...
A stunning--and welcome--development: on July 15, 2010, the Spacemen 3 played a short reunion set at the Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen in London. The show was a benefit for former Spacemen 3 drummer Natty Brooker, who has cancer. It was the first live performance by the band in two decades, and while the band was led by founding member Sonic...