Live music reviews

Ben Folds Five | Did you get your love and religion last week, folks? Because the Ben Folds boogie revue stopped in town on Valentine's Day to spread both the good and the bad words with blue songs, beautiful three-part harmonies and ivory tickles... (2/1998)

Brad & Pond | The groove and verve, the tenderness and ferocity: It's honest arena lounge and heartfelt basement histrionics. It's a powerful live experience and makes one truly believe Brad's sincerity... (10/1997)

Brainiac | Squeezing four kinds of freakout into a three-minute song is easy: bringing it together in a tight and downright moving performance is hard... (4/1997)

Guided by Voices | Robert Pollard, Guided by Voices' mainman, is a character. He doesn't try to be, but he's a songwriting machine who can be afraid to perform, a rock star with a comical lack of coordination and a former fourth-grade teacher who can drink your sorry face under the table... (7/1997)

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion | It's a sticky, fuzzy line that Jon Spencer slides his long and lascivious fingers along. Energy means sweat and sweat means action and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (The Blues Explosion!!! or JSBX to you) wants everyone to take that, rub it all over and spread the word... (3/1997)

Pavement | You can't throw a cigarette butt without hitting a barn full of squinty-eyed critics who think they've told you all that you need to know about Pavement... (4/97)

Red Red Meat | When Red Red Meat quietly took the stage and opened with the coma-paced “Airstream Driver” from the band's latest CD, “There's a Star Above the Manger Tonight,” it set the low-down drone tone for the evening... (3/1997)

Sigur Rós | Sigur Rós makes beautiful and unique symphonic rock. The band has been an indie darling since 1999's “Agætis Byrjun” release attracted the attention of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, thrusting four shy boys from Iceland into the spotlight.... (2/2006)

Royal Trux/Cash Money | Royal Trux makes the kind of music Keith Richards heard after he'd gone unconscious: The future passed — part senseless, part dead. It can be a sloppy, pathetic and sometimes interesting nod scene... (6/1997)

Wayne Kramer | Wayne Kramer is a veteran rock 'n' roller, and it shows. His successes and failures with the seminal, revolutionary MC5 in the late '60s and early '70s have informed and galvanized his outlook and performance... (7/1997)

Um, then I got tired of doing show reviews on deadline so there are no more.



Album reviews

Drive-By Truckers | Southern Rock Opera is a two-disc, three-guitar rock opus about bands, booze, and life and death in the American South. Bandleader Patterson Hood calls it an examination of misconceptions about the South and a study of modern-day Southern mythology. Paced like a movie and loosely inspired by the legacy of Lynyrd Skynyrd, this release is where DBT hit its stride... (8/2005)

Faith No More, Baby Chaos, Slaughter | In the “Too Stupid To Give Up, Please Stop, This Can't Go Unpunished” category we have three more contenders... (6/1997)

L7 | Not yet online (?/1991)

Monster Magnet | Not yet online (?/1991)

Red Red Meat | Chicago underdog Red Red Meat can't miss the mark when the target is so damn undefined. And it should be difficult for critics to get any solid hits in when they're looking through a thesaurus just trying to find ways to slam the band's strum-it-out honesty... (2/1997)

Stooges | When the David Bowie-mixed version of “Raw Power” was released in 1973, it was ignored just as the Stooges' first two records were ignored. It didn't help that Bowie had nuetered the ferocity of the band (at the behest of the record company), turning growls into meows and diluting the brutality of the songs with a tinny, thin mix. The Stooges, simply put, were too scary for the rest of the world... (6/1997)



Interviews

Jack Endino | Not yet online (?/1992)

Flitus | Okay, this is Bob and Bill interviewing Zebulon Neurwith and Starbuck Phoenix of the band Flitus. It's late and we're all hungry. (2/1990)

Helmet | Not yet online (?/1991)

Seaweed | Not yet online (?/1991)

Smashing Pumpkins | Here's a 1991 interview my friend Bob and I did with Smashing Pumpkins. They were playing the Babylon A Go-Go in Cleveland and I was publishing a bike/skate/music 'zine called ACC (which, of course, stood for Atomic Circle of Chaos). It was a scissors and glue 'zine, photocopied on 8 1/2 x 11" paper, except in this case: I decided to get fancy and do gatefolds on legal paper for the Pumpkins interview portion of the 'zine. So, here are some scans of a beat-up copy of the 'zine, which was issue 14, since there is no way I'm transcribing the interview. Have fun, and please forgive our youthful naivete and dorkiness. This interview is now more than 15 years old, which means I was 15 years younger when we asked all these questions. Still, Corgan and Iha humored us and gave an nice interview to a couple of young music geeks... (7/1991)



Articles

Music Fer Luvers | The lights are off. The moon and a 100 candles shine with a soft glow upon the bedroom scene before you. A figure moves in your direction, swaying ethereally. You hear the digital hum of the beginning of a Chopin CD... (4/1994)

Screaming Trees | Not yet online (4/1991)

Smashing Pumpkins | The stage was just a couple feet tall and Billy Corgan, James Iha and D'Arcy Wretzky were standing right on the edge of it, just inches away from us, loud and beautiful. The Smashing Pumpkins became one of the biggest alt-rock acts of the 1990s, but in the summer of '91 the Chicago quartet had just released their first album, Gish... (12/2005)

Tehom | Tehom is a spacy kind of jazz painting floating eerily out of a run-down apartment in Youngstown, Ohio. The improv musical stylings of Paul Bishop (guitar), Auggie Ruggierra (bass), John Gray (drums) and Jeremy Hazlett (keyboards) run from bizarre jazz to Middle-Eastern harmonic-minor scales to sheer heaviness, all in one smokily-crafted song... (4/1994)

Throneberry | Throneberry played their first show on Valentine's Day, 1990, an appropriately ironic beginning for this Cincinnati-based band. Their debut album, Sangría, on Alias Records, is a pretty, melodic outpouring of heartfelt sour notes and lighter-than-air rhythms chasing something sinister and scary underneath... (4/1994)

Wayne Kramer | Being a legend doesn't pay that well. Just ask Wayne Kramer. As half of the MC5's guitar army in the late '60s and early '70s, Kramer laid the much of the groundwork for what turned into punk rock. The band wanted revolution, but it was the music industry that revolted — against the band... (6/1997)

Others not online yet



By The Billy Keaggy (Last updated 17 Dec 2006)i am keaggy.com