When Athens’ favorite sons R.E.M. released Life’s Rich Pageants in 1986, the rest of the world finally got a peek at what the college rock crowd had been raving about for years. Four albums into it, R.E.M. had their strongest commercial success with Lifes Rich Pageant, a foreshadowing of what was to come with the impressive succession of follow ups (Document, Green, Out of Time and Automatic for the People).…
SPOILER ALERT! To get the big unanswered question out of the way up front, don’t count on a Husker Du reunion any time soon. “Beyond my personal reasons for not looking back, a Husker Du reunion would surely tarnish the history of the band,” front man/guitarist Bob Mould writes in See a Little Light. In his exhaustive new bio, Mould – co-founder of the highly influential Minneapolis indie punk group…
Washington state’s The Riffbrokers have managed to find a way to sound completely timeless. They play “rock” without any unnecessary prefix needed to describe their sound and as a result they could have recorded their latest (Every Pilot’s Blinded By the Sun) in the studio right next to Tom Petty when he was working on Damn the Torpedoes in ’79 or they could have just as easily been playing with…
Not since The Big Chill has a drama so deftly relied on music to serve as its own character in a movie. The emotional indie, The Music Never Stopped, is based on a true story by neurologist/researcher Oliver Sacks (the doctor who also inspired the book and eventual movie “Awakenings”) about a father (played flawlessly by J.K. Simmons) who uses music to connect with his son (Lou Taylor Pucci), hospitalized…
After a bumpy couple of seasons, the long-running HBO series finally gets back into its groove with the seventh and second to last season. This season finds actor Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) between movies, hooking up with porn star Sasha Grey (essentially playing herself) and getting addicted to booze and Cocaine. His hangers on have each found their own lives, Eric (Kevin Connolly) managing other actors; Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) pitching…
Matthew McConaughey may have just found his ticket out of the romantic comedy ghetto. Lincoln Lawyer, based on the wildly popular Michael Connelly novels, centers around the somewhat sleazy defense attorney Mickey Haller who works out of his Lincoln Continental (get it?). Don’t worry, Haller (played deftly by McConaughey) is a loving dad, gets along great with his ex-wife and has just the right amount of charm to make you…
American TV audiences have a problem saying goodbye… well, let me clarify, American TV show producers have a problem saying goodbye as evidenced by how often they keep the shows on life support long after all of the story lines have been exhausted and the audience has moved on. Though NBC’s ER happens to be a big exception to that rule. By centering the show around a revolving cast of…
Nick Cave is right up there with Leonard Cohen and the late Jeff Buckley as being one of those musicians everyone claims to love but if you look purely at record sales all three still hover closer to cult status rather than international superstars…which is far from being a bad thing (unless you have to pay a mortgage). If you’ve been resolving to actually listen to Cave versus just nodding…
A hybrid of fact and fiction, Bob Pfeifer’s latest is an impressively original look at secret societies and International corruption in the courtroom, all tied into the real life trial of Amanda Knox. The story is cleverly told through journal entries, interviews and news reports and centers around a hush-hush society of international celebrities called The Strangers (everyone from Dave Grohl and Woodie Allen to Sean Penn and the fictional…
Along with having quite possibly the best named backup band in the recent history of rock, Glenn Tilbrook, the former front man of the influential UK pop rock band Squeeze, is also a fantastic pop music song writer. Live in New York showcases this better than just about any of his albums. Coming across relaxed and humble in a small New York club, Tilbrook and his band run through nine…
Squidbillies is by far the best cartoon depiction of redneck, inbred squids living in the Georgia’s Appalachian Mountains since… well ever. The Adult Swim show packaged in tidy 10 minute episodes was conceived by the same brains behind Adult Swim staple Aqua Team Hunger Force, so if that show has you scratching your head, it’s probably best to skip Squidbillies. Your loss though, unless you can find another adult-targeted cartoon…
Given the paint-by-numbers memoirs that are being churned out at an alarming rate lately by rock stars that reveal just about nothing, it’s refreshing to read a collection of essays by a little known indie folk singer who reveals more about herself via humor than the recent works of Belinda Carlisle, Vince Neil and Scott Wieland combined. In You Must Go and Win, Alina Simone opens up about her childhood…
Chicago’s Material Issue is one of the best power pop bands to come out of the 90’s and there were a slew of decent bands from that genre in the 90s. International Pop Overthrow, the band’s first major label (and finest )release is finally getting the anniversary treatment, complete with a slew (eight to be exact) of bonus tracks including a live version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” and…
The most surprising revelation about the History Channel realty show Swamp People is how the network manages to portray the families in the series in an honest, non exploitive manner. The show focuses on a number of Louisiana families who make their living in the swamps catching alligators and snakes. Yes the Cajun accents are thick enough to require subtitles, but there are no ridiculous scenarios constructed simply to make…
If Queen were to make their debut now, instead of 1973 when they released their eponymous debut, it’s very likely they’d be considered a novelty band, and I’m not even talking about Freddy Mercury’s skin tight cat suits or Brian May’s getting closer to God afro as reasons why. The songs alone, which have proven not only to be fantastic examples of what can be accomplished with hard driving drums…
You’d be excused for thinking Shot in the Dark, the new HBO doc from Entourage’s Adrian Grenier, was little more than a predictably sappy tear jerker aimed at the Lifetime crowd. That’s certainly what I was expecting, so I was pleasantly surprised when the film turned out to be a sincere look at Grenier simply searching for answers about the estranged father he grew up without. Out on DVD just…
Those looking for unpublished secrets about AC/DC or even just a basic backgrounder about Australia’s loudest export are bound to be let down if that’s their sole reason for picking up Rocker’s and Rollers. Yes, Johnson is the front man of the phenomenal successful hard rock band and you know he has a slew of backstage stories that would make Motley Crue’s Dirt read like a Judy Blume book in…
Like pairing a Sex Pistols t-shirt with a pair of old cowboy boots, Dallas-based band The Von Ehrics play cow punk in a way that everyone from Willie to Glen Matlock would approve off. Fast, raucous and loud, Two Foot Stomp finds the band at its finest with the release of their fourth album. You can still hear a slight twang in Robert Jason Vandygriff’s vocals that sound simply sublime…
Remember how cool it was when the writers behind True Blood trotted out the shape shifters in season two to compete with the vampires for our attention? With season three they’ve jacked the bar up pretty high by bringing out a whole parade of supernatural creatures. The series picks up with Sookie (Anna Paquin) turning to a werewolf named Alcide (Joe Manganiello) to help her rescue her vampire beau Bill…
Kids in the Hall fans must be in heaven with this massive release. On 20 DVDs, they have managed to cram in all five seasons of this highly influential Canadian sketch comedy series (that’s nearly 800 sketches).The show has been off the air for more than 15 years, but the skits hold up remarkably well (the same can’t be said for most of the recent SNL sketches that don’t even…