The Hard Lessons announce the release of ‘B&G Sides’, which will be a sweetly packed box set of Volumes 1-4 due out July 22 on the Quack Media label. Hailing from the Motor City where they were named Artist Of The Year by Real Detroit, Augie, Koko Louise and The Anvil shined at this year’s SXSW fest where they played Spin’s party at Stubbs alongside some much-written-about acts, prompting the…
James Hunter starts off “The Hard Way†with a brand sixties rock that has no direct contemporary influence. I could hear “The Hard Way†on the radio and be assured that the track is from over 40 years ago, that is how solidly Hunter is entrenched in that style. After that introductory track, “Tell Her†comes forth with a sound that follows pretty directly from “The Hard Way†but approaches…
Final Fantasy XI is one of the largest MMORPGs around; at the time that the latest expansion pack, Wings of the Goddess, was released, there were over 500,000 active subscribers linked up to the service. Final Fantasy XI originally went online in 2002, while Rise of the Ziliart, Chains of Promathia, Treasures of Aht Urhgan, and Wings of the Goddess were released in 2003, 2004, 2006, and 2007 respectively. Each…
Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins was aired on Animal Planet in May of 2008. This film, narrated by Whoopi Goldberg (Sister Act) and produced/directed by Chris Barker and Mike Slee, gives individuals some idea into the life cycle of a meerkat, especially those that are in the deserts of the Kalahari. This is done by showing the growing of Flower from an infant all the way to being a major…
The final season of Home Improvement, which originally ran from 1998 to 1999, gave individuals 28 episodes of footage, a collection that runs for about ten and a half hours. The show had creeped down the Nielsen ratings to reside at its lowest position ever (#10 overall), but the episodes that are present in the tenth season shows Tim Allen and the rest of the cast at their strongest. Perhaps…
The time has come for the most opulent party in Ibiza to open its doors for the summer… Pure Pacha’s legendary 18 week stint starts with their opening on the 30th May 2008. Having built a reputation for bringing together musical quality, great parties and like minded people – Pure Pacha promises to deliver a night you will not forget.
error is the follow-up to seminal avant-folk cult figure Kath Bloom’s 2006 return to active musical duty, Finally. The new album was recorded at Barking Spider Studios in Warren, Connecticut with Kath and her husband Stan Bronski producing. Terror is being released by Chapter Music Summer 2008.  The daughter of oboist Robert Bloom, Kath grew up in New Haven, CT, where she studied the cello as a child and…
Decapitated – this Polish death metal band was formed in 1996 when the average age of the band members was just 14. Many people focused on Decapitated’s age as a reason to doubt them – the fact was that the band were already becoming an established live act throughout Poland, and in working so hard on the road had earned themselves a cult reputation as genuine contenders rather than simple…
This is another zine that I had the distinct pleasure of copying for the editor, Foyle, who is in her own right an awesome girl. I feel closer to this zine than many others, as I was like a midwife to its birth. Zines like this really make me wish that I had a style of handwriting that I was pleased with, as Foyle’s handwriting is just so cool that…
Thrash metal giants Testament have chosen acclaimed video director Thomas Mignone (Avenged Sevenfold, Superjoint Ritual, Slipknot) to shoot the video for the first single from The Formation of Damnation, “More Than Meets The Eye.†The video will be shot in LA.
This box set closes the chapter on USA’s series The Dead Zone. All in all, it covers nearly ten hours and has a number of features that give individuals a better appreciation for the show. The bonus features start off with “A New Home For ‘The Dead Zone’â€, which showcases how the crew and actors had to pack up and move to the other side of Canada – from Vancouver…
Army Wives: The Complete First Season / 2008 ABC Studios / 552 Minutes / http://www.lifetimetv.com/shows/armywives/index.php / The Iraq War is going on its fifth year, so the premise of Army Wives is one that is not too far outside of reality. The numbers that Army Wives pulled in is further proof of that; when the show originally premiered, it garnered Lifetime’s biggest ratings ever. This boxed set features the first…
Aaron LaCrate & Debonair Samir, top purveyors of the explosive Baltimore club sound, have stepped to the plate to overhaul this classic track. Young MC’s fast-rap rhymes on “Know How Theme” are ideally suited to LaCrate & Samir’s hyperactive beats. As Lacrate says: “When I was a kid growing up in Baltimore I loved Young MC. I would make mixtapes where one side would be up-tempo club jams and the…
Gnaw Their Tongues, an enigmatic project from the Netherlands that has wowed fans of messed-up heaviosity with the phenomenal Reeked, Pained and Shuddering CD that was released on Paradigms along with a host of super-limited CDR and cassette releases, is joining the Crucial Blast roster for the CD release of the new full length An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood, which was released as a limited edition vinyl release at the…
The debut album from the Portland quartet Trees delivers two epic tracks of monolithic, blackened doom metal with a twisted, noise-damaged approach and a dank basement vibe. Trees craft glacial abstract riffs and rivers of ashen amplifier goo that fans of feedback-laden heaviosity will find highly satisfying, a kind of grinding, slow-motion black hole psychedelia that has a similar hypnotic death-ritual quality as artists like Bloody Panda and Khanate, but…
Ragged #1 / Free / :15 / 32M / http://www.raggedmag.com / This is a combination magazine that was created for American Rag (which seems to be a Macy’s-only clothing brand). I’ve never heard of the clothing line, but then again, I’m never in a Macy’s. Filter Mini seems to be what individuals can compare this magazine to, and where there is a lot of advertisements in both magazines, American Rag’s…
Crucial Blast will release the debut CD from Japan’s instrumental avant-death shred machine NOISM on August 26th. Noism was formed by guitarist Yoshiro Hamazaki and programmer Tomoyuki Akiyama in 1999 in Tokyo, Japan, and from the beginning the band has focused on creating intensely complex and crushing death/grind using programmed drums, brain-melting riffs and dissonant shred, which is chopped up and processed into abstract death blasts that defy physics. Early…
The World Ends With You is a game that was developed by the same crew that released Kingdom Hearts, and in much the same way, it breaks the barriers of what was previously thought possible both in terms of the Nintendo DS and of the RPG genre in general. The style of art that is present throughout the game has been tremendously influenced by the youth culture of Shibuya, which…
CBS / Paramount is slowly and surely releasing episodes from one of the longest-running shows in existence, Gunsmoke. When one adds on the years that it spent as a radio show, the length of time that Gunsmoke was a fixture of American audiences is unparalleled. This time out, the second half of the second season (which originally was aired in 1957) is covered, with the Gunsmoke cast featured in 19…
The beginning of “Magic’ starts out with a decidedly seventies Latin-tinged type of instrumentation. The funk and soulful clap present in this track, which come forth like those in a Teddy Pendergrass track, soon gives way to Thicke’s vocal stylings, which pose themselves as drawing from a rich musical tradition that plays a little bit on Stevie Wonder, more on Lionel Richie, and some Justin Timberlake to bring some younger…