Kennysun via Wikipedia

Of Monsters and Men

My girlfriend got a new car recently and it has satellite radio. The result has been a lot of channel-surfing and among the more regular selections is Alt Nation.

Though there are certainly some god-awful songs that get played on there, on the whole, it isn't bad and has even led me to some interesting new music.

One band that gets a lot of play on Alt Nation at the moment is the Icelandic group Of Monsters and Men. Unfortunately for me, they embody many of the things I hate about indie music. Most notably, I heard a live version of their song "Little Talks" and instead of the bland horn section that mirrors the melody on the record, there was just a single trumpet playing the same boring part. All I could think was, "Is that even necessary?"

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Courtesy Jacksboro Highway

L-R: Pete Best, John Lennon, Delbert McClinton, Bruce Chanel, Paul McCartney, George Harrison

Lonesome, Onry and Mean didn't get in much trouble in school. So his parents were a little disturbed to find the eighth grader in the principal's office on the afternoon of February 10, 1964. He and his best friends, Mike Clowdus, Brad Rutledge, and Larry "Suitcase" Simpson, had been written up and sent to the office by Mr. Stephen Haynes, the eighth grade honors algebra teacher.

The infraction? Combing our hair like the Beatles.

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Photos by James Bricker

Yo Gabba Gabba Live!
Verizon Wireless Theater
December 2, 2011

Check out our picks of DJ Lance Rock and friends at Yo Gabba Gabba Live!.

As a parent, Rocks Off can tell you firsthand about the sacrifices involved in child rearing. Most of us know going in that there are trade-offs for raising your own personal organ donors, from simple things like no longer getting to sleep in on Saturdays to losing command of your own television.

Parents (those who admit to it, anyway) who let their kids watch television realized long ago that there was little to be gained from bitching about the quality of children's programming. We got beyond that years ago, sagely realizing such fare was not created for us, and should therefore be outside the realm of adult critique.

Some TV shows, however, are beyond the pale. Some offer so little nourishment to the child's mind they should be rallied against like big box stores in our affluent neighborhoods or Mark Twain in our school libraries. We speak, of course, of Yo Gabba Gabba.

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Photos by Marc Brubaker

Buxton at Rudz in August

Lonesome Onry and Mean has been spinning local sensation Buxton's upcoming release Nothing Here Seems Strange for almost two weeks now.

And we're sorry, but we still don't get it.

Maybe we are old and jaded and out of it, but to us it sounds like a bit of Clem Snide or Mumford and Sons lite, only in our opinion Buxton doesn't have the chops, the vocal abilities, or - probably the most important dealbreaker - the memorable lyrics of those comparable bands.

We're not implying there's some calculated scheme to make the record fit a Mumford template going on, but LOM's biggest complaint after hearing the album a couple of dozen times is that nothing sticks, not even "Blown Fuse," which we assume will be the single New West Records pushes to college radio when the album finally hits the street in January. (A remix in Los Angeles pushed back the expected September release date.)

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If you are lucky enough to have already gotten a Turntable.fm invite, and you work somewhere that is down with your listening to streaming jams, then right now you could be listening to the Stone Roses and Stereo MC's in Rocks Off's new Houston Press Rocks Off Spin Off on the social DJ site.

Naturally, the first song we spun on the site was the Rolling Stones' "Rocks Off," because you have to say a prayer to Keith and Mick before any major life decision is made, and this was no different.

We started playing with it yesterday after we got an offer to do a charity DJ set on the site and we were enthralled. It's a hell of a lot of fun, and the applications for the blog here are limitless. We can have our bloggers spin their favorite stuff, or go track for track with an artist they are interviewing. Can you imagine Shea Serrano and Slim Thug trading licks? Sounds good to us.

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Back in 2008, supermodel Marisa Miller filmed this commercial for an edition of Guitar Hero, but it was deemed too sexy for television. Maybe it was the gratuitous cleavage and ass-shaking by a half-naked Victoria's Secret model that pushed the censors over the line or their sworn allegiance to the performance of Tom Cruise in the film Risky Business that scuttled the ad.

Marisa Miller playing Guitar Hero is hot and all, but it would have been a lot better had they let Megan Fox play Guido the Pimp.

Photo illustrations by John Seaborn Gray

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We here at Rocks Off try to stay abreast of as many up-and-coming genres as we can for the sake of attempting universal coverage (and we do it all for you), but sometimes even we gets blindsided. This "chillwave" business has come out of nowhere, and none of us have even the faintest idea what it is.

It seems like the more we investigate, the more clouded it gets, because due to the contrary nature of the culture, no one we reached out to would admit to being involved with chillwave in any way. Still, we figure there must be a rapidly growing chillwave underground here in Houston. Right?

Well, should one ever show up, to help Rocks Off readers get acquainted, we took the data we collected from chillwave hotspots like Hipster Runoff and fed it into a computerized translating program similar to Babelfish. The program gained sentience, and now believes itself to be an actual chillwave DJ by the name of "Intrinsic Hopeflash."

Here is what it told us, with a translation provided after each paragraph for those of you who do not speak chillwave.

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As a white thirtysomething male who digs Merle Haggard, Al Green and Skynyrd, Rocks Off is well aware our hipster cred is pretty much in the toilet. Even the bands we do like that were once considered at least kinda "cool" - Wilco, Spoon, Phoenix - now share air time with Jack Johnson and the Dave Matthews Band on "Houston's Adult Alternative." But that's... OK.

​For one thing, we live in Houston, the one large American city where hipster-baiting is at least as competitive a sport as pro soccer. And perhaps because we could not give less of a shit what "glo-fi" is and cannot name one single Animal Collective - sorry, "AnCo" - song, we find following the adventures of those who do endlessly fascinating and entertaining. (If that applies to you, though, Rocks Off could probably use you. Drop us a line.)

Rocks Off, finger-on-the-pulse as we are, has only just now discovered the Hipster Runoff blog, a Web site that liberally tosses around terms like "viral," "meme," "AZN" and "alt" in a style best described as text-message poetry. Here, everyone is a "bro" and M.I.A. is a goddess, something we can find no fault with whatsoever. Another recent HR convert is Solange Knowles, who, as she is wont to do, immediately announced her discovery to all her bros on Twitter. Rocks Off finds this information - as well as Solange's subsequent apologia that she was only late to the party because she's a "blipster" and hangs around other parts of the Interwebs - mad relevant and LOL-worthy.

Now, if you'd care to click through (or scroll down), we have some actual news we'd like to share with you. It's about how you can help some local kids who could use some new band instruments so perhaps one day they can grow up to play chillwave themselves - although by the time they reach their mid-20s, chillwave will no doubt be as passe as hair metal, Steel Panther notwithstanding.

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