The Cult came to the Warfield on a Sunday night as part of their Love Tour, a show that has them playing through their classic first album on a nightly basis. When bands play the full albums, fans get excited in advance, but having seen a number of these shows for myself, they’re usually boring affairs, as you already know what’s coming. What’s the fun of track eight, “Revolution,” when you know that track nine, “She Sells Sanctuary,” comes next? Well, I’ll tell you what kind of fun that is. Continue reading “Show Review: The Cult at The Warfield Theater, 8/23/09”
The Bay Area band Judgement Day plays string metal, and play it so well, they deserve to own the domain stringmetal.com, where you’ll find their website. This week, on Friday night, they’re playing a headlining show at 924 Gilman, where you’ll have the opportunity to pick up a copy of Out of the Abyss: Live on Tape, a new 7″ vinyl release from the band. We caught up with Anton and Lewis Patzner, the violinist and cellist of Judgement Day, and asked them to answer some questions for us.
Listen to the podcast to see why this photo is here
Episode 3 of the Spinning Platters podcast is now available below, and in iTunes. Dakin, Gordon and D.P. are joined on this episode by writer Raffi Yousouffian for a discussion of:
What we’ve been listening to
Cult Bands
Stop the War on Fun and the ongoing fight to keep San Francisco all-ages clubs open
I the Mighty are a fairly new band, having developed out of a two-man acoustic project called Breakpoint. Now signed to Bay Area indie label Talking House Records, we caught up with them as they prepared to play what they expect to be their biggest show yet, this Friday night the 21st at Blake’s on Telegraph in Berkeley. I the Mighty are:
Brent Walsh – vocals/guitar/piano
Ian Pedigo – guitar/vocals
Chris Hinkley – bass/vocals
Blake Dahlinger – drums/percussion
Word coming across the Twitter-wire is that Les Paul has passed away.
A friend and I went to see him play about a dozen years ago at a bar in New York. We figured we only had a little time left to see this living legend (I think he was about 80 at the time). I half expected that he would already be frail and unable to tear shit up on the guitar, but he was absolutely amazing. He also stayed behind afterward to chat and sign autographs with everyone. It was a great night.
Next time you hear or play an electric guitar, be sure to think of Les.
Listening to the new Jay Reatard album, Watch Me Fall, has presented me with a puzzle I’ve never had to solve before. What if you like an album too much to do a proper review of it? How would you approach it? You’d do it by relying on the biggest security blanket a modern writer has. You’d make lists. So read on to see just how many lists I managed to make out of Jay Reatard’s masterpiece of an album. Continue reading “Album Review: Jay Reatard — Watch Me Fall”
Staring down at their instruments, as they often do
People ask me all the time, “which band have you seen the most?” To this question, I answer Moxy Fruvous. If they ask me who’s in second place, I can answer that it’s Phish. Last night was the 22nd time I’ve seen Phish in concert, but for the first time in a dozen years. It’s hard to “review” a Phish show; it is what it is. Consider this a personal exploration into an evening of Phish. Continue reading “Show Review: Phish at the Shoreline Amphitheater, 8/5/09”
Next thing I knew, I was on Youtube watching a video that was a compilation of great John Hughes movie moments. In that spirit, this is my tribute to the great musical moments (and a couple of others) from John Hughes movies. I don’t have a lot to say here; just watching the clips is enough. Pretty much everyone in my generation got a lot of personality shaping from his movies, so this is just my way of paying tribute.
Because I could never go home empty handed, I ended up with this
For most of my life as a music nerd, Tuesdays were always my favorite day of the week. On Tuesdays, I’d stop at Strawberries Records in West Springfield, MA and shop the new release rack. I wouldn’t let myself leave without buying at least one thing. This is how I ended up with The Bends, as I had liked “Creep” but not Pablo Honey, but there really wasn’t anything else interesting out that week. As time has passed, Tuesdays have become less and less important, because now the release date for an album is somewhat random: when it shows up online, it’s released. Yet for some reason, the record labels are clinging to these release dates. And in many cases, they still release albums on different dates in different countries. This, for obvious file-sharing reasons, is beyond lunacy. This post is a plea for record labels to end the archaic practice of release dates. Not to help me–I’m well served by the Internet–but to help themselves.
The company I work for in my everyday life has a saying: “We make it easy for our Customers to buy from us.” When will the record labels adopt this attitude?
