Imagine being run over by an M1 tank. Then, imagine, for a moment, what that might sound like—in slow motion.…
On January 6, 2021, I watched the pearly Capitol dome rising above a sea of scrambling bodies. I heard voices…
Before the internet, the hypnotic vibration of instant, momentary notoriety meant little to most musicians. The early influencers of popular…
From their promising 2011 debut, the “Willoughby’s Beach” E.P., to their sixteenth full-length album, “K.G.”, in 2020, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard careen between genres like shiny metal balls coursing down through the slots and obstacles in a pachinko machine. They specialize in an acutely distorted psychedelic garage rock, defy appearances, and have managed to remain hyper-productive and inventive at the same time; successfully transplanting their 60s rock roots into the dampened soil of numerous musical vessels…
His fourteenth single, Max Romeo recorded “Black Equality” in 1971. The song showed Romeo progressing toward a politically oriented consciousness, and his album “War Ina Babylon” was the project where his ideas coalesced into a moral value that could outlive the oldest, tallest tree in the forest…
With their conspicuously violent, horror-core sensibilities, the Misfits confounded audiences in the late 1970s—mainly childlike onlookers come to witness the primordial fatalism of East Coast punk rock up close. The Misfits greatest songs encapsulated a minimalistic post-Ramones translation of rock ‘n’ roll invoking peculiar 1950s doo-wop harmonies delivered straight from the warm coffin of Elvis Presley…
King Tubby’s mesmeric songs are sonic resurrections, and his body of work is, in a word, a sublime tribute to the artists whose songs he’s reimagined, setting the blueprint for likeminded recording engineers and head-expanders worldwide…
After pushing and testing modern music boundaries for more than thirty years, Napalm Death goes further by continually refining their sound, refusing to get stuck, pressing forward, growing, and evolving…
While I steer my body through the shimmering heat, my headphones, sunglasses, and mask sealing me off from the world, I think back to another August day when the boundaries of music were buckled and expanded by a man snugly ensconced in his own headphones. He did not know it, but he was about to change the world. The date was Saturday, August 11, 1973. The man was Clive Campbell, also known as DJ Kool Herc…
Finding ways to share one’s music is no less complicated than it was before the digital revolution. But the precarious life of an up-and-coming musician has become ever more precarious in the age of COVID-19…