I know the Punk Revolution of the late ’90s has come and gone, and punk as a musical genre is now all mainstream and accepted and moving upwards, but y’know what? It just hasn’t worked for me. The bulk of punk bands who’ve managed to hit on some kind of success leave me cold, and it’s not because I’ve outgrown the music or anything like that…
For the better part of a decade, Brooklyn trio Parts and Labor have been tearing up and down the U.S., on a perpetual quest to scare us out of the collective slumber of everyday life. Their music combines the anthemic hardcore of Hüsker Dü and the political consciousness of the Minutemen with the squealing electronics of Baltimore’s burgeoning Future Shock movement…
~ In which singer Mike Weibe of The Riverboat Gamblers describes their views on music, their love of Texas, and their preference of Lone Star over Shiner… ~…
Some bands are just so bizarre they don’t let you look away. I meandered up to Rudyard’s a while back to catch a friend’s band and watched with a mixture of dread and fascination as this motley quartet called The Octopus Project (the opening band, it turned out) spent a half-hour setting up a cluttered mass of instruments, black boxes, and cables…
The Mountain Goats are John Darnielle. Literate, energetic, sincere, and acoustic, he’s one of the best things going in music today. His lyrics manage to paint knowing pictures of real humanity with an economy and emotional strength…
