Mark E. Smith was notorious as the “Hip Priest” of U.K. post-punk, leading the Fall with the most evil sneer in rock & roll. But his music took a surprise turn in the early Eighties, when he arrived home with a young American bride on his arm. Brix Smith was a blond California...
There was an almost punk-rock tenacity to the way he would force you to listen to the effeminate side of his voice. I saw shows with a room full of guys wearing flannel shirts, and he would bring a song down to him singing vocal runs a cappella. He would keep doing it ...
Wire were thesharpest, most inventive malcontents in the UK punk class of ’77, knocking out two-chord blasts of primal blurt that madethe Sex Pistolssound likeTraffic.Pink Flagseemed to reimagine rock itself from the basement up — from the surging, war-torn “Reuters” to the static-cli...
The letter ‘E’ is the most common letter in the English language. It appears in roughly 11% of all words used in the English language and is used 12 times in this very sentence alone! New Zealand is actually part of a much bigger, sunken landmass. Dubbed Zealandia, it was only disco...
and knowingly stupid. The most mercilessly entertaining entry was this one-off from Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, an exhilarating hit of dance-floor cocaine with a sugary rhythm guitar, a subterranean-deep bassline, and one of dance music’s all-time great autocritiques: “Ooh, baby, I feel...
Bogeys moved slowly in the combat flight simulator, enemy missile lock-ons were easy to dodge, and your F-14 Tomcat plane came loaded with 40 (40!) missiles. Even so, most players never reached the later levels because most players ended up slamming their jet into the ocean while attemptin...
Given the just-in-time ethos of the Jamaican recording industry — developed to serve a ravenous sound-system culture — the provenance of “Liquidator” is and will remain cloudy. The most common origin story involves singer/producer Tony Scott selling the germ of a tune called “What Am I...
The River Junction in Marion will celebrate the life of Gilda Downey, longtime owner of Gilda's Stone Rooster, on what would have been her 100th birthday.
it is the most immediately "gettable", not to mention the most satisfying to look at once your hacked-together solution is complete. They churn and whirr with steampunk precision. It doesn't take long for the thought of these alchemical conundrums to seep through your skin and into your bl...
Squalls of punk noise, industrial haze, and churning rhythms jut up throughout Mount Kimbie’s third album, Love What Survives, but “Marilyn,” the record’s most hushed song, resonates the loudest. Recalling the gentler moments of post-punk icons like This Heat and the Raincoats, the UK...