Features
Wednesday, December 15 2010
The Best Punk of 2010
Since punk is a wide-ranging umbrella genre saturated with numerous subcultures, styles, aesthetics, and attitudes, making a list is more like trying to super-glue together a ripped and torn fanzine.
Columns
Friday, May 18 2012
Feeling '80s Spirit: Post-Hardcore Punk for the Plastic Generation
Moss Icon and Jason Farrell still sizzle in the present tense, despite years of obscurity.
Monday, April 16 2012
Reluctant Gunslingers and Incorrigible She-Devils
Can classic Hollywood films help us navigate today’s environment of political apathy and cynical media saturation?
Wednesday, April 4 2012
The Future is Female
Sometimes, the prism of the future can be envisioned in the kitchen and playground, in unexpected forms of empowerment.
Friday, February 17 2012
What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and the Power of Music?
Denise Sullivan represents the insider intellectual stamina of rock 'n' roll journalism without the pomp and pretense. She is the past and future of the form, rolled into one uncanny style.
Monday, January 16 2012
Machine Guns and Metaphors: Outlaw Poet Todd Moore Remembered
The tough, vernacular, and outsider writer Todd Moore became an icon of Outlaw Poetry; he disdained academia, embraced gangsters like John Dillinger, and made American poetry pulse with dark blood.
Reviews
Wednesday, August 31 2011
Folk Rebel Blues: 'Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune'
As a folk-rebel, Phil Ochs feels charmed and harmed and rattled, talented and slightly twisted, in-the-grain and adrift at the same time.
Monday, August 15 2011
Roiling R&B and Rebellious Rock ’n’ Roll in 'Keep on Pushing'
Denise Sullivan paints with condensed strokes, documenting in succinct sections how the music segued with powerful protest movements to smash disfranchisement and rouse sometimes fleeting victories.
Friday, July 29 2011
You Can't Annihilate This Band: Black Flag's Legacy and Lore in 'Spray Paint the Walls'
Donning a yellow Circle Jerks shirt and a fuzzy upper lip, I awaited the buzzsaw, off-kilter power chords and frenetic, rasping Henry Rollins. Instead, I endured an endless barrage of molten, jazz-noise-metal riffage from a band that clearly disdained the charade that punk rock had become.
Tuesday, June 28 2011
A Thousand Ways to Love, a Thousand Ways to be Hurt: The Legacy of Lefty Frizzell
Like others of his honky-tonk ilk, Lefty Frizzell embodies the story of wits and perseverance in a time when poverty gripped portions of the South in a steadfast grip.
Monday, May 9 2011
The Poetry of Pathology: 'An American Demon'
True Sounds of Liberty singer Jack Grisham knocks down the weathered statues of punk lore.
Blogs
Wednesday, May 16 2012
Top Ten Lost Midwest Punk Singles
From the basement dust bins come the sound and fury of the flatlands! Sounds Affects takes a look at ten outstanding obscure punk 45s from the American Midwest.
Wednesday, April 4 2012
A Savvy Soundtrack to Modern Decay
The Artcore fanzine produces another compilation LP that showcases the brutal beauty of punk in the present tense.
Tuesday, March 6 2012
War on Women Begins the Righteous Fight!
By mixing darker shades of old school and modern hardcore with incisive feminist diatribes, War on Women produces a walloping torpedo of truth.
Tuesday, February 21 2012
From Indiana, With Queer Punk Love
Brimming with punk prowess, queer biographic forays, and eager earnestness, High Dive makes music for those seeking more than dread and doldrums.
Thursday, February 9 2012
The Dark Pop-Punk of the Shadow Delivers
Unlike potboiler musicians with kiss-off egos, the Shadow proves that Blank Generation music was open-ended and robust, a welcome home to punk brands of all stripes.
