Entries associated with the tag "Rock":

Someone has given Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead his own personal army. It's only a virtual army in a video game at this point, but I expect it to happen in the real world soon enough. Watch the following teaser for this upcoming Lemmy documentary and you'll probably want to be among the first to volunteer:

As Dave Grohl puts it: "Fuck Keith Richards. Fuck all those dudes that 'survived' the 60s, flying around on Learjets, living up their gunslinger reputation as they fuck supermodels in the most expensive hotel in Paris. It's like . . . You know what Lemmy's doing? Lemmy's probably drinking Jack and Cokes and writing another record."

Jimi Hendrix hawks Guitar Hero from beyond the grave. Activision, the game's maker, is celebrating the main-stage Guitar Hero performances at the Isle of Wight Festival this weekend by modding the island's bronze statue of Hendrix.

(Question: Can Jimi beat Dragonforce on expert?)

(Music Radar via Kotaku)

Guitar innovator. Sartorial radical. Self-mythologizer. Absolute badass. Bo Diddley pretty much embodied every good idea rock 'n' roll has going. Now that he's gone--he died of heart failure earlier today at his home in Florida, after months of ill health--no one can do him justice in a tribute song because he already wrote them all for himself.

About 99 percent of the pitches I get from publicists are little more than annoying reminders of how many shitty-to-mediocre bands there are and how many of them can afford a publicist. But every once in a while they can inspire you to go back and listen again to something you may have dismissed too quickly or just didn't get.

My latest experience with this phenomenon is We Are Wolves, whose recent Total Magique I pretty much dismissed out of hand, probably because their previous full-length didn't do much for me and on the cursory listen I gave to the new one nothing really popped. But after getting e-mails from like five different people to preview their show tonight at the Funky Buddha--and after getting another copy of the record, this time on marbled vinyl--I went back and discovered that I'd been totally wrong. Magique is an album-length riot of dirty electro injected into dirtier garage rock and I can't believe I didn't get hooked on it the first time around. Anyone interested in getting completely buck wild should put tonight's show on their agenda. 

Mudvayne is still hard at work on a new album they're describing, in either an outburst of honesty or critical preemption, as "not Pink Floyd's The Wall." In the meantime they're putting out a "greatest" hits record with a couple new tracks "to remind everyone the band's still together." In other news, my entire day has been ruined by having been reminded that Mudvayne is still together, and that they even existed in the first place. I would've been perfectly happy to never again have to think about them. But now, thanks to MTV News, I have. So I'm passing the favor along to you. Mudvayne happened. They're still a band.

Enjoy your weekend.

Q101's figured out how to get people to sit through the entirety of a new Hanson song: by not telling them they're listening to Hanson. Apparently the scam had some success, as the song, "The Great Divide," became the station's most requested song. When Q101 finally revealed who the "mystery artist" was, digital sales jumped 95 percent. I would've expected rather a mass reaction along the lines of the end of Oldboy, multiplied by a thousand.

Via Gerard vs. Bear, which seems to be back in action after some downtime.

For the past couple years there's been a trend where companies put streaming audio jukeboxes on their Web sites for no apparent reason. Usually they're programmed to reflect some quality of the business, some level of "extremeness" or "family-friendlieness" or whatever they're trying to project. The one thing they all have in common is that they're utterly useless. I only ask for a limited amount of information from the Domino's Pizza Web site: what's the number of the closest location to my house, and do they still have that Garlic Bread pizza? (They don't, sadly.) I definitely don't go there to get tipped off to "hot new sounds" and I can't imagine why anyone else would either. But that didn't stop Domino's from launching the dTracks Music Player. 

The image that Domino's seems to be projecting with their song selections is "absolute blandness"—befitting a company that ditched the Garlic Bread pizza—with a dash of "hopelessly out of it." The player has three playlists: the "Clubbin Mix" combines Euro-club dance music and neutered hip-hop in a way I haven't heard since 1990. "Summer Road Trip" seems like it was programmed in an alternate universe where John HPopper and Tom Cochrane have been THE musicians of the past 15 years. The only really modern-sounding channel is the "Party Mix"—a misleading title, given that the whole thing is shitty emo no one on earth would want to party to. It's also the only playlist where the dTracks' middle-of-the-roadness actually worked for me. Outside of My Chemical Romance—who are geniuses—I prefer my emo as average as possible. I like knowing on first listen exactly where the song's breakdown will happen and what it'll sound like. Immediately after listening to every song on the playlist, I found myself absolutely unable to recall a single band name or scrap of melody, which was perfect. Thank you, faceless emo bands. You wasted a half hour of my life pretty good.

I was curious if the pizza/music connection was popping off industry-wide, but so far no other pizza company has stuck a music player on their Web site. Pizza Ria had a sort of sweetly annoying pop song on their splash page. I guess it was okay. The pizza I got from them was better.   

The Arts section in today's New York Times has a profile of Chicago adult-alternative act NYCO. More specifically, it's about NYCO frontman Ted Atkatz, who quit his job as the principal percussionist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to pursue his soft-rock dreams on the club circuit. You can tell the piece's author, Daniel J. Wakin, is a little off his usual classical beat, as evidenced in the disbelieving hand-flapping in this passage:

He now plays in joints across the Midwest, sometimes performing for the bartender or, on a good night, several hundred people. Orchestra Hall? Carnegie Hall? The Musikverein in Vienna? Forget it. Try the Mousetrap in Eau Claire, Wis., or Beaner’s Central in Duluth, Minn.

Although I don't really have any hard data on NYCO's popularity, I'm going to point out that for most bands with a self-released album and a "Past Shows" list that includes the Mousetrap and Beaner's, playing for several hundred people is rarer occasion than a "good night."

More funny disbelief: 

Indeed, these days Mr. Atkatz has become his own stagehand, lugging keyboards and guitars into clubs, where the intermission drink of choice comes from a tap, not a Champagne bottle, and where the fragrance is stale Coors, not Chanel. Sometimes his nightly take barely covers gas and meals. Instead of fancy hotels, the band’s red minivan is where he often sleeps.

I've seen that minivan around town, and it's actually pretty nice.

Oh look, music industry commentator Bob Lefsetz took a break from ranting about how professional skier Bode Miller is like Led Zeppelin to bash the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for inducting Patti Smith. He argues that Alice Cooper is a more deserving candidate: "And, have you forgotten Alice Cooper’s 'School’s Out' package, with the desk opening up to reveal the record in panties? That’s performance art worthy of Warhol." (You gotta love Lefsetz--he has that perfect balance of knowledge and insanity that has produced some of our nation's most beloved homeless people.)

I was originally going to post about how wrong Lefsetz is, and that Patti Smith is being inducted probably because she's amazing and brilliant, not because of "a Bruce Springsteen cover," but then I reminded myself that I no longer give a fuck about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It's sort of a New Year's resolution of mine. The place is like a Hard Rock Cafe that started taking itself way too seriously, and its annual induction ceremony is just another excuse for rich old people to talk about how much better "their" music made the world. It's a circle jerk that ends with a jam session, and I don't like either of those things.

While thinking about this I vaguely remembered an episode of The Drew Carey Show where Drew steals Buddy Holly's glasses from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Then somehow that got mixed up with something I read in this real upper of an article about trash scavengers in the slums of the Philippines: "A popular [arson] technique involves releasing a rat or cat soaked in kerosene and set alight into a settlement, where the terrified creature can start dozens of fires before it dies." Now I've got this image of a flaming Drew Carey running around the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, igniting all sorts of really important crap. This will keep me entertained all night.

I just found out off of Metafilter that legendary steel guitar player "Sneaky Pete" Kleinow has died at age 72. I first heard Sneaky Pete's name after getting I got heavy into the Flying Burrito Brothers, the band that encouraged him to record what still stand as the most far-out psychedelic steel guitar parts ever to hit pop music. But he also played in sessions with a ton of other amazing acts, and seeing his name in the liner notes to a record in the used bin at Reckless has long been a reason for me to drop a hard-earned $3.99.

What I didn't know before tonight is that Sneaky Pete was also a special effects guy and stop-action animator who worked on Empire Strikes Back, made Gumby move, and probably fucked a whole bunch of dogs' worldviews up with the Gravy Train chuck wagon. Before, I was just jealous of the guy's musical abilities. Now I think that he probably won the game of life harder than anyone I've ever heard of. 

The Ume CD sat on my desk for at least a week before I put it on, mostly because it's called Urgent Sea -- I can get down with a lot of bad puns and whatever, but I have a hard time finding the will to cosign on something that cheesy. But it took about 1.5 seconds of listening to the record for me to regret wasting all of that time. The songs are better than OK, but most of the band's goodness comes from front woman Lauren Langner Larson, with her space-epic guitar wail, feral-sexy vocals, and pleasingly alliterative name. Her singing is a Kim Gordon "Drunken Butterfly" growl-slash-whisper, but her guitar playing is all Lee and Thurston. She dresses like a Gap regular and shreds like a cock-rock dude with very specific body-image issues. I'm probably skipping the Black Angels at the Bottle on Sunday night to head up to the Beat Kitchen to see them. I'm hoping that unlike the Lindsey Buckingham show there will be no embarrassing poetry recitation and shitty-sounding dad rock to drive me out of the room after four songs.