First off, let’s not sugar-coat this: this isn’t for everybody. I guarantee that the first (and only) reaction a lot of people will experience when they hear Emmure’s Slave to the Game is going to be to twitch uncontrollably…
Once upon a time, somebody sent me a CD. I was a little reluctant to give it a listen at first, honestly, because at the time it seemed like I’d been inundated with folky female singer/songwriters, and hey, it sure looked like yet another one of those…
On into Sunday now, December 23rd, and while many of us out there (me included) are pretty much fully taken over by holiday-stuff madness at this point, hey, there’re still shows going on, and several of ’em are damn good. Here we go…
It’s Saturday, December 22nd, now, and yours truly’s just having a quiet night at home, savoring Modern Society giving the middle finger to those pesky Mayans and their goofy prophecies and introducing the 8-year-old to Doctor Who. Been that kind of weekend…
We’ve gotten word recently about several musical-type things people are currently giving away for free to anyone who wants ’em, so I figured we’d run ’em down real quickly in this spot. Here goes…
Wow. Tonight’s the first night of the weekend, Friday, December 21st, and it’s not only the first day of Christmas/holiday vacation for some of us (okay, fine; mine was yesterday) but also — if you listen to people who think science is all made-up nonsense but paranoid ideas about aliens and magnetic pole reversal…
Yep, running behind, but there’re still a couple of shows well worth checking out tonight, Thursday, December 20th, and I didn’t want to drop the ball completely, at least…
A very music-savvy friend of mine once commented that he thought the secret agenda behind the whole Chicago post-rock wave of the late ’90s was to make jazz palatable to indie-rock kids. After listening to Sunrise and Ammunition’s Tesseract…
Sometimes I dread checking the Webmail the morning, fearing the flood of label/PR emails that’ve come in over the past 24 hours or so and cringing when I see stuff about the weekend just past that I totally dropped the ball on. Sometimes, though, that morning email brings awesomely cool things to my Inbox…
The time: two years before the Civil War. The place: the deep south. The person: Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave being slow-walked across to auction in Texas. Or at least, he was, until his band is stopped…
The easiest way to describe Deer Tick is to simply call them garage rock. They have the sound of a band that you’d expect to see playing in a dimly lit bar, spitting beer on people while more or less trashing the already-trashed place…
Yeah, I know I’ve been slacking off on the Sunday writeups of late; I’ve just been getting overwhelmed and running out of time, and a lot of recent Sundays have been relatively light, shows-wise, so…well, I skipped ’em…
A little later than I’d hoped, today; ended up having an, um, interesting day of running errands, being barred from apparently-private parks, and fishing misfired arrows out of the neighbor’s yard with a rake, so I’m a bit behind on the show writeup for today, Saturday, December 15th. Even still, there’s time to get out […]
For some bands, the only real goal they have in mind, ultimately, is the music equivalent of The Big Score. They want the mythical perfect record deal, where somebody’ll just throw money at them to make music, and they never have to worry about working again…
Got some previously-scheduled stuff I’m trying to get to tonight, Friday, December 14th, so I’ve got to keep this brief, I’m afraid. There’s a lot of good shows happening, though, so I didn’t want to let ’em fall through the cracks…
It doesn’t seem like it’s been nine years since Peter Jackson and company delivered the last of the Lord of the Rings films, but after making forays off into other films for a time, they are back to deliver…
As a precursor to this review… I was completely unfamiliar with the term “steampunk,” and only just read about it when researching Rush. Now that I know what it is, I can see how they would be interested in such fantastic designs. In a nutshell, steampunk deals with a futuristic vision using only items of the distant past…
These days, anybody can put out an album. All it takes is a couple of instruments, a mic, and a computer, and poof: instant bedroom-studio rock that you can dump out onto the Web for all to hear and comment on (and okay, maybe even buy). After a while, though, that whole “album” thing, it gets boring, played out. When that happens, well, what the hell do you do next?…
Been meaning to post about this for a while now, and we’re seriously coming down to the wire, so it’s kind of now-or-never… Shane Patrick Boyle, one of the awesome, hardworking organizers of Zine Fest Houston…
Yeah, I know I just posted a review of Austin band The Eastern Sea‘s First Christmas, their brand-new album of Christmas tunes — two new ones, “This Is Christmas” and “First Christmas,” both of which…
Some things just can’t be resisted: koalas, M&Ms, re-runs of Doctor Who, and yes, one of my favorite bands in The Whole Freaking Universe doing an album of Christmas songs. Admittedly, if done badly, this kind of thing generally…
Yup, it’s Saturday (December 8th, specifically), and there’s definitely good stuff happening. In fact, there’s pretty much a three-way tie for Most Badass Oh-Crap-Why-Wasn’t-I-There? Show Going this evening; here’s what sounds & looks good to me…
There was a time when I was really, really into politics; I had a lot more time on my hands back then, both because I worked for a slow-moving Big Evil Company that didn’t give a damn what I did at the office, so long as I made my deadlines…
It’s Friday (December 7th), but it’s kind of a light evening, honestly, especially given the jam-packed Friday nights we’ve had recently. But hey, that doesn’t mean nothing good’s happening, by any means; here’s what I think looks cool…
Whoa. Alright, so I may have been listening to Omotai’s brand-new album, Terrestrial Grief, just a little bit too loud. Final track “Yuri” just marauded and destroyed its way to the end, and now I’m just sitting here…
Cool, cool, cool. I hate to admit it, but I never got to see Honky Tonk Blood, the quasi-tongue-in-cheek B-grade (and intentionally so) comedy/horror flick by Hank Schyma of the {Southern Backtones}…
There is so much music out there these days that I find myself having to limit what I listen to and what I buy, because it’s expensive and because I just don’t have the time to listen to everything. Sometimes it will take me years of hearing about…
Hollywood has been making movies about itself almost as long as it has been around, but The Director (Anthony Hopkins) never thought he’d be the one on the wrong end of lens, with all of his flaws…
Well, damn. Today — Sunday, December 2nd — kinda-sorta crept up on me, and I totally didn’t realize (despite looking at the shows list all the freaking time) that there was this much going on. And yeah, I completely neglected to talk…
On to Saturday, December 1st, and damn, it’s looking like a good day/night, at least to me. Before we get into it, though, I wanted to mention that the December 21st show at the House of Blues with Boys Noize has unfortunately been cancelled…
With each release, it’s starting to feel like Austin instrumentalists My Education are drifting further and further away from where I’d had them initially pegged — namely, as a spacerock band, more than anything else, in the same vein as fellow Texans Explosions in the Sky or Co-Pilot. Skyward-pointing guitars, swooping melodies, spacey drones…
