Heckler's Delight: Eternal Adolescent Punks The Queers
Where Didn't Monotonix Play Last Night?
Monotonix at Super Happy Fun Land in Houston (Full Tilt Boogie, Ya'll)
Blink-182, the Gateway Drug of Punk Rock
Aftermath: "You Are Gonna Have To Speak Up, We Went To Motorhead Friday Night At Warehouse Live"
| Photos By Eric Sauseda |
Beatles: Rock Band Returns Next Thursday At The "Best Of Houston Birthday Bash" at Lucky's Pub
We will be setting up shop upstairs at Lucky's in our special Rocks Off loft, where dirty deeds will be done dirt cheap, or at least a reasonable market price. There will be plenty of alcohol throughout Lucky's to sate your thirst and to aid in better game play. We noticed that all of you guys got progressively better at the game as you guzzled down the Beatles-themed drinks that the coffeehouse was slinging, which you see evidence of in the video below.
Everything Louder Than Everything Else: Adventures With Motorhead in Pop Culture
| Craig Hlavaty |
The band is synonymous with danger and disarray. Their logo the "Snaggletooth" and all its interpretations denote something frightening and alternately free at the same time. Lemmy's distinctive facial features and grizzled contentment are pure rock 'n roll, even if both are subject to ridicule from their detractors. The band isn't metal and they aren't punk, but they contributed to both genres' disparate lineages and became the one group that each sub-culture could share a beer over.
Tonight: Yet Another Branch of the Homopolice Bush, The Energy, Debuts at the Mink
Les Paul Is Shredding Axes With Jesus and GG Allin Now (Wait, That Can't Be Right...)
Thanks to Mr. Jesse Dayton for showing us this clip
Les Paul, the musician who literally created the definitive sound of rock 'n roll with his slew of equipment inventions, has passed away at the rockin' age of 94. Seriously if you make it that far after spending your life in smoky halls and recording studios you officially own. The technical baby daddy of rock 'n roll succumbed to complications from pneumonia.
The list of innovations credited and patented by Les Paul stand as a monument to the man that helped shape the sound of rock 'n roll. He pioneered the art of multi-tracking, various delays, phasing, and overdubs. All this on top of helping create with Ted McCarty one the world's most iconic guitars, the Gibson Les Paul.
Houston Remembers Green Day, Back In the Day
| Photos by Rachelle Mendez and Matthew Juarez |
Inquiring Minds: Crown of Thorns' and the Plasmatics' Jean Beauvoir
The Distillery: Rancid's Let the Dominoes Fall
Houston's Rememberances of Warped Tours Past
Local 7-Inches of the Week: A Ditchwater Double Dip
Art Rock: RunnAmucks At The White Swan
Playbill: Pontiak Tonight At The Mink
When you crank it all the way up, Maker hits like a mild concussion with the fuzzy, descending riff of "Laywayed." The buzzing stops just as quickly as it started, leaving you with ringing ears just 30 seconds in. Just when your head starts to clear, the band drops back in on top of you, adding a heady layer of vocals to the already saturated sound, along with drums so wet you can practically feel the spray with each echo-laden pound. From there, "Blood Pride" vaults in next, riding a driving bass-line into a charging blues scale riff built on shimmering guitar and alternating single- and double-note syncopation, dutifully delivering the slight swagger its title implies. Next up, "Wax Worship" reveals a different side of Pontiak, its swirling noise providing the perfect foil to the more anchored sound of the first two cuts. Never content to leave well enough alone, the Carney brothers' blues drone soon rises out of the clattering drums and squalling feedback, like an occult version of Jack White's reductive 12-bar pastiche.
Just in case the drop shift in the middle of "Wax Worship" left you jonesing for noise, the band cannily obliges with 74 seconds of all out pandemonium on "Headless Conference," with cymbals crashing alongside frantically paced drums and similarly rambunctious guitar and bass. This is not about technique, or about melody. This is the exhilarating dip in a frozen lake following a languid sauna - from slightly claustrophobic and vaguely eyelid drooping, to shockingly awake, not quite sure what's going on as you get your bearings. This heaving and jerking occurs repeatedly throughout the album, creating a feel that, while it doesn't exactly flow, never allows complacency. You can't just hear this album -- it makes you listen to it.
Playbill: Strange Boys Hit Mango's Sunday Night
That doesn't mean there's not room for a few bands who plunder the 13th Floor Elevators with the kindergarten abandon of early Clean records. Following 2007's little-heard Nothing EP, last year In The Red issued the Dallas transplants' tinny two-minute single "Woe Is You and Me," setting the table for this past March's woolly full-length, The Strange Boys...And Girls Club.
Nerd Alert: Trailer for "The Beatles: Rock Band" Debuts
The visuals in the trailer are faithful to the boys from Liverpool, down to every detail. We were astonished at how close the designers got the avatars to look like the actual Fab Four. The game chronicles the band as it crawls out of obscurity in the Cavern Club, changes the world on the Ed Sullivan Show, gets trippy in the late '60s, and finally closes out with the band on top of the Apple building in 1969. Throughout you will hear snippets rarely heard from in-studio recording sessions, adding to the game's already heavy nerd cachet.
Pi Studios, a Houston-run videogame production shop, is actually developing the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 2 components for "The Beatles: Rock Band", set to hit stores on September 9. The production house has helped produce many of the "Call of Duty" games, but it seems its main job is to produce expansion packs for the extremely popular "Rock Band" series, such as November's AC/DC edition.
Aftermath: New York Dolls & Black Joe Lewis at the House Of Blues
Aftermath is not going to purport to know what the New York Dolls were like live, in their Thundered and Killer-ed heyday of kitsch and campy kiss-offs. We weren't even in Pre-K when Buster Poindexter was singing "Hot Hot Hot" on Saturday Night Live. But for chrissakes, they couldn't have been this awkward and stunted. (Thanks, YouTube.)
It can't be age, because folks like Mick Jagger and Iggy Pop are of an age when "one should know better" and they still look like feral cats onstage, stalking their audience, their wounded and alluring prey.
So then, what's wrong with what's left of the original Dolls, David Johansen and Syl Sylvain? They both seem to have their hearts in doing those classic Dolls songs, some of which are nearing 40 years of age. Hell, the guys even write and release new material with a group of guys that can't be but half their respective ages. Rock and roll seems to still be in their veins, if only for the benefit of nostalgia-fueled boomers looking to waste some dough on proto-punk legends.
Live Shots: New York Dolls at the House Of Blues
Jukebox Hero: Little Big's In Montrose
Life-long Houston resident Caswell opened up the slider hut just a few months back. He bought a jukebox from the owner of an icehouse off 290 that was closing down. The jukebox came with the requisite beerhall fodder: Seger, Skynyrd, Journey and the like. You know, the kind of stuff your Dad used to listen to in the garage as he fixed the lawnmower your stupid teenage ass broke.
Caswell's musical journey began as an adolescent sneaking into the Big Easy off of Kirby, which was just blocks from his house, to see the blues artists and generally soak up the vibe.
Flannel File: The Descendents
1995- L7, Seaweed, Swingin' Utters, CIV, Quicksand (that's right- the first Warped Tour had both ex-Gorilla-Biscuits bands! Beat that, Coachella!)
1996- Beck, Dance Hall Crashers, Fishbone (!), Dick Dale (!!!), Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Rocket From the Crypt
1997- Amazing Royal Crowns, Descendents, Murder City Devils, Social Distortion, the Bouncing Souls
OK, true, the 1997 Warped Tour also featured blink 182 (bleh), Sugar Ray (ick) and Limp Bizkit (barf). Wow, I totally do not remember seeing those last two bands, thank God. But luckily, I did see the Descendents, which is the point of this story. And pretty soon afterwards, I went out and bought the album they had just released: Everything Sucks.
Mp3: Black Congress' "Davidians"
The group released a split-tape with Muhammad Ali early this year that blew Rocks Off's black socks off and made us have to drive back to Mom's house to dig out our old Walkman cassette player.
Aftermath: No Doubt, Paramore, and The Sounds at Cynthia Woods
Any returning mega-band thinking of mounting a huge reunion tour to drain poor folk of their cash (cough Blink-182 cough) need look no further than No Doubt's current tour and sold-out set last night at Cynthia Woods to see how it should be done.
For the bands that were fortunate enough to be opening for the SoCal power-poppers, it also stands as a lesson in how to age gracefully in an industry that increasingly seems to be honoring youth over experience. Hell, in five years a fetus may have its own Twitter and Disney Channel show. No Doubt can still rock as hard as it did with Clinton in the White House.
The Sounds, a devastatingly underrated Swedish New Wave crew, opened the festivities with yet another solid set of straight-ahead dancey thrash. We love the Sounds, from lead singer Maja Ivarsson's punkish wail to multi-instrumentalist Jesper Anderberg's constant sound manipulations. The tragedy of these Swedes is that they should be a million times bigger than they are. Most American audiences only see them at the beginning of a monolithic bill, buried by glittery headliners. One can gain a better perspective on what they do during an hour-long set, not the 20 minutes or so they occupied last night.
Did we mention how feminine this show was? The crowd had to have been three-fourths of the lady persuasion, with a smattering of fathers and erstwhile punk rockers dotting the crowd. For many, No Doubt was their "first" band, while some may have discovered them through lead singer Gwen Stefani's sugar-dipped solo flights. Funnily enough, most of the little girls in the audience were probably not even conceived yet when Tragic Kingdom hit stores in late 1995.
Friday Night Noise: Caldera Lakes, Wolf Eyes, Cop Warmth
Wolf Eyes |
Each week, we'll hone in on three tunes, each by a different noise act. One of them will be from Texas. The other two will be from somewhere else. We'll hook you up with (last.fm or MySpace) links, because we're totally down with sharing the discordant wealth. Remember: discogs.com is your friend in a lot of cases. (We encourage you to join and help keep that site current.)
Noise releases - vinyl, CDs, lathe-cuts, 7-inches, cassettes, etc. - often fall out of the sky without any forewarning whatsoever, resulting in noise addicts discovering that new Dead Machines or Zaimph or Idlness Distribution shit is available weeks, months, or years after severely limited-edition conception. Thus, Friday Night Noise reserves the right to hip you to gnarled insanity issued 18 to 24 months earlier than a given publication date. Will this mean that you'll be a bit behind the curve in some cases? Probably, but if you're desperately into noise, chances are you won't care. Plus, sometimes it takes awhile for a Merzbow, John Wiese, Yellow Tears, or REACHING. composition to really zoom into focus such that one can explain it in words.
With all that outta the way, let's get noisy!
GG Allin Lives On In Bobblehead Form
| Aggronautix.com |





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