It feels like punk never happened!" Don Letts is spluttering over his breakfast, and not because of an annoying headline. The cultural revolutionary is up in arms over the closure of rural post offices. Or, more accurately, he is up in arms that the rest of the country is not in arms over the closure of post offices, or schools or other public services ...
"Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, Ecstasy and alcohol/C-c-c-c-c-cocaine." With those words, Josh Homme introduced excess to a metal landscape lousy with mook thumb-suckers. Weaving the stoner rock of Homme's old band Kyuss with Blue Öyster Cult evil and scummy garage punk, 2000's Rated R was refined stuff. Homme sang surreal lines ...
On an album full of moments when hope turns haunting, the ghosts hang heaviest on the spellbinding "Suburban War," which comes roughly halfway through Arcade Fire's blazingly intense third album. Against solemn ringing guitar, Win Butler sings about a man remembering an old friend. Once, the two grew their hair long and vowed to escape, past the fences and pavement, to a place where they could battle on behalf of what was pure. Years pass in a shiver of violin and piano, and now they find
In this adaptation of an indie comic, Michael Cera plays bass in the hapless garage band Sex Bob-Omb when he's not battling his love interest's "evil exes." For the soundtrack, Beck phoned in a few slacker-punk novelties for the cast members to deadpan (including the noisy, gleeful "We Are SEX ...
It's telling that Nathan Williams, a.k.a. Wavves, is a poor speller. His hazy California pop punk is all about skipping school and riding your bong to the ocean. On the third Wavves full-length, a one-man bedroom experiment blossoms into a real band, with Jay Reatard's feisty backing duo and Modest ...
I've never seen 80s sci-fi film Tron, nor have I been following the fevered build-up to to its sequel Tron Legacy which is on the way later this year ...
Joe Strummer would be proud. Maya Arulpragasam, the British-Sri Lankan hip-hop art-punk guerrilla, has his genius for stirring up trouble, his wide-eyed humor, his zest for turning fury into wonderfully fucked-up music. But not even Strummer could piss people off with what he had for lunch. Three years after sampling ...