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…
Napalm Death was on my shortlist of music to find—like an archeologist digging their way toward an ancient tomb. In September of 1989, I finally struck treasure when I pulled a vinyl copy of Mentally Murdered from the racks, holding it up, exposing it to sunlight for the first time…
In 1977, the Germs set out to destroy the detached, artificial tone of pop. The popular music of their time corresponds with sadly predictable accuracy to what lives on the radio today—like what is propelled like a cannonball from passing SUV windows or crawls from cell phones with the nasal tremors of a vengeful mosquito. Punk rock music, by contrast, was especially vibrant because it was performed by human beings in modest recording studios…and it spoke to the origins of American folk music.
African Head Charge create a synthesis of experimental reggae, psychedelia, dub, and electronica. Rhythm from the drums and bongos, play into one another like percussive molecules. I went to bed each night and I put on the same album and by day thirty, I realized I couldn’t stop listening to it.
