Welcome to the Rocks Off 100, our portrait gallery of the most compelling profiles and personalities in the far-flung Houston music community -- a lot more than just musicians, but of course they're in there too. See the entire Rocks Off 100 at this link.

Photos courtesy of Giant Battle Monster

Who? Giant Battle Monster, we're fairly certain, is the first Rocks Off 100 inductee to have recruited someone to deliver aborted chicken meat from under his dress live onstage. Delightfully weird, a little disturbing, GMB's aggressive math-rock veers from raunchy death-metal to trippy prog-rock to outre sci-fi sountrack stuff in the course of the group's most recent album, February's Giant Battle Monster Vs. the Subterranean Antler Man.

The four-piece Houston band is the brainchild of possible evil genius Chris Gerhardt, who founded GBM at age 19. "I prefer not to sit still, focus on a single thing or sleep, really," he says.

Gerhart has a music degree and has also trained as an electrical engineer, and says today he works with small radio transmitters ("and pretty soon I'm gonna quit"). With GBM, he's recorded two albums he didn't have to pay for and once covered 25 percent of the country on a 32-date tour with local instro-metal group Cavernous and the now-defunct Barkus, Sly and the Golden Egg.

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Welcome to the Rocks Off 100, our portrait gallery of the most compelling profiles and personalities in the far-flung Houston music community -- a lot more than just musicians, but of course they're in there too. See the entire Rocks Off 100 at this link.

Who? "Y'all ready?" asks Casey Royer, lead singer to the men who join him in Houston's The Jobe Wilson Band. They nod, so he begins: "1-2-3-4." Uploaded as a grainy video to YouTube on August 22, 2011, The Jobe Wilson Band -- then a trio; now a quintet -- begins "Like the Rain," a slow and melancholy tune guided by Royer's rugged tenor.

A year later, the band, now with five members, performs a growling stand-up performance at the Dirty Bay Beer Company. This sound is less emotional and instead, more metallic and closer to the Lynyrd Skynyrd sound they are compared to. Today The Jobe Wilson Band is an Americana/Southern rock band consisting of Royer on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Ryan Dickson on guitar, Lee Nuckols on guitar, Kevin Choate on bass and Anthony Comeaux on drums.

"We've been peddling our music around the great state of Texas for about five years or so, give or take," Royer tells us.

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Welcome to the Rocks Off 100, our portrait gallery of the most compelling profiles and personalities in the far-flung Houston music community -- a lot more than just musicians, but of course they're in there too. See the entire Rocks Off 100 at this link.

Photos courtesy of Kimberly M'Carver

UPDATED (Thursday, 6:30 p.m.) Corrects the spelling M'Carver's last name and the songbird she was compared to by Jimmy LaFave. Our apologies to Ms. M'Carver.

Who? Sometimes a hunch will pay off. Kimberly M'Carver's -- not McCarver -- latest CD, Hard Waltz, showed up in the mail here at the Press a week or two ago. Rocks Off did not recognize her name (forgive us), but knew enough names on the one-sheet bio to raise an eyebrow. The muscians who appear on Hard Waltz have also worked with Little Big Town, Elvis Costello, Robert Plant and Austin acoustic sprites the Greencards, among others.

Once we had a listen to Hard Waltz, those names made a little more sense. M'Carver's fourth album, it's a no-frills, perfectly produced, largely acoustic set that should fit comfortably on your trad-country shelf next to the Dolly Parton, Kendalls and Sweethearts of the Rodeo records. Absent of any pickup trucks, shotguns, or crossover-pop ambitions, Hard Waltz requires little more than M'Carver's pristine soprano to carry it home. (Veteran Austin folksinger Jimmy LaFave once likened her voice to a meadowlark nightingale, which fits pretty well.)

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Photos by Jay Tovar/ courtesy of Bombón on Facebook

One-fourth of the Bombón crew, DJ Panchitron continues to evolve as one of the best DJ/Producer combos in Houston. His ear for combining cumbia, tropical and tribal with rap creates some of the most adventurous, hard-hitting, and downright funnest music in the city.

Who? Panchitron is a native of Mexico who was raised in L.A., born Francisco Javier Briones. He moved to the Houston area -- Alief, specifically -- in early 2000, and in 2007 began studying the DJ arts with mentor Toy Selectah.

"Spending time and touring with Toy around the U.S. molded my style," Panchitron says today.

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Brecht, right, with Pasadena Napalm Division

Who? Kurt Brecht is the iron-lunged front man of D.R.I. (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles), the ridiculously speedy hardcore punk band that got its start bashing out tunes inside his parents' house in Houston back in 1982. After shattering the sound barrier with the 18-minute, 22-song Dirty Rotten EP the same year, D.R.I. pulled up stakes and headed off to San Francisco, where the group became patron saints of skateboarders everywhere by welding together the more aggressive elements of hardcore and metal into a blistering new sound known as crossover thrash.

These days, D.R.I. continues to incite wild circle pits and gnarly backside fakies the world over. The band just finished a tour with fellow crossover legends Suicidal Tendencies and kicks off a string of dates featuring its classic '80s lineup this Friday at Scout Bar.

Now back in Houston full-time, Brecht keeps busy pulling double duty as the front man for Pasadena Napalm Division, the local thrash supergroup also featuring members of deadhorse. Their debut album is scheduled to drop in a matter of weeks.

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Welcome to the Rocks Off 100, our portrait gallery of the most compelling profiles and personalities in the far-flung Houston music community -- a lot more than just musicians, but of course they're in there too. See the entire Rocks Off 100 at this link.

Who? Sloan Robley of Silenced Within is a rarity in Houston goth music in that she's got metal in her veins. All the other spooky music in Houston tends towards the beepy and the boopy, through Ex-Voto keeps the deathrock alive. Still, Robley has a dark majesty to both her voice and physical form, and bringing both to bear on the music Silenced Within makes is how her song "Venomous" ended up No. 5 on our list of the ten best Houston goth songs ever.

It's a strange place to land from church-choir and classical-music beginnings.

"My mom sang in the Houston Methodist choir," says Robley via email. "As she was a single parent, I was the only kid in the empty pews listening to the choir practice. I would lie down in the pews, stare at the stained colored glass, and feel like I was floating. The music reverberating through the quiet sanctuary was surreal. I'll never forget that sound."

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Welcome to the Rocks Off 100, our portrait gallery of the most compelling profiles and personalities in the far-flung Houston music community -- a lot more than just musicians, but of course they're in there too. See the entire Rocks Off 100 at this link.

Photos courtesy of Jack Saunders

Who? Jack Saunders is one of Houston's most dependable singer-songwriters and guitarists, and is rarely lacking for work. Alongside Shake Russell, he was one-half of arguably the most popular folk duo around these parts for most of the '80s and into the '90s. He has also released four albums of his own material, and seems to be picking up the pace -- his brand-new Grit & Jangle comes hot on the heels of last year's A Real Good Place to Start; Saunders says the new album has "more of an emphasis on the rock side of folk and country."

Saunders grew up a Navy brat, bouncing around California, Rhode Island, Alaska, "and many states in between." When the British Invasion dawned, so did his life's ambition: "make girls scream!" A friend bringing by a Bob Dylan record steered Saunders toward the songwriting side of the continuum, he adds.

As a sideman, Saunders has played with many top troubadors, including Ray Wylie Hubbard, Greg Trooper, Randy Weeks, Susan Gibson, and Hayes Carll. He has also produced and/or recorded dozens of titles at Houston's White Cat Recording, the studio Saunders opened in 1996.

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Welcome to the Rocks Off 100, our portrait gallery of the most compelling profiles and personalities in the far-flung Houston music community -- a lot more than just musicians, but of course they're in there too. See the entire Rocks Off 100 at this link.

Photos courtesy of Richard Ramirez

Who? Richard Ramirez is one of Houston's finest noise artists under the monikers of Black Leather Jesus https://www.facebook.com/pages/Black-Leather-Jesus/117719674921150, Werewolf Jerusalem, An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter, and many more. His work is dark, terrifying, and full of the sort of sounds that you'd expect to emanate from beyond the doors of Hell itself. He got started in the late '80s after listening to experimental music broadcasts on KPFT and KTRU, then haunting Sound Exchange and Vinal Edge for albums by Merzbow, The Haters, Nurse With Wound, and the like.

Ramirez just returned from a tour that took him all up the West Coast of the United States and Canada, and is planning for a European jaunt next year. In addition, he has an upcoming collaboration with Blue Sabbath Black Cheer scheduled for a vinyl release soon, as well as works with Smegma, Nihilist Assault Group, and Andrew Liles.

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Welcome to the Rocks Off 100, our portrait gallery of the most compelling profiles and personalities in the far-flung Houston music community -- a lot more than just musicians, but of course they're in there too. See the entire Rocks Off 100 at this link.

Photo courtesy of Mike Migl

Who? Mike Migl, aka Mike Meegz, is Houston operations manager for Austin-based hip-hop promoters Scoremore Shows. He was born and raised in the southwestern suburbs around Sugar Land, Richmond and Rosenberg.

"I grew up in a single [parent] household raised by my mother," Meegz tells us via email.

Rewind:

Rap Capitalism (cover story, Feb. 14, 2013)

He adds that he has one biological sister, Morgan, who is three years younger, served in the U.S. Army as an engineer, and completed two years of college for an associate's degree. Music-wise, he says, he owes everything to Chamillionaire and the Houston rapper's Web site.

"I've always had an ear (sounds very cliche) but I always burned CDs for friends who couldn't find the music I jammed," adds Meegz. "[I] came up on Houston music through Chamillionaire.com, [my] favorite rapper/site/forum back in the day!"

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Welcome to the Rocks Off 100, our portrait gallery of the most compelling profiles and personalities in the far-flung Houston music community -- a lot more than just musicians, but of course they're in there too. See the entire Rocks Off 100 at this link.

Photo courtesy of Medley Inc.

Who? Jacqui Sutton is the lead singer for the Frontier Jazz Orchestra, a local band that fuses jazz and bluegrass. She was introduced to jazz in the 1980s, singing in San Francisco, and bluegrass in Portland, Ore. Her love of both music genres prompted her to combine them into a genre called Frontier Jazz, and she is now dubbed "The Jazzgrass Lady."

"The two sounds (jazz and bluegrass) have been living contemporaneously in my head since the 1980s, and it was only in 2010 that I realized I could fuse the two sounds together, which became the sound of Frontier Jazz," she says.

Sutton currently hosts a bimonthly (the first and third Wednesday of each month) YouTube performances of the singles from her two albums, Notes From the Frontier and Billie & Dolly.

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