Show Review: SRSQ, Uniform, and The Black Queen at The Regent 03/28/19

“Maybe we could just…”

After a long work period it’s nice to have an evening to cut loose and check out some damn good music. It was this thought that ran through my head as I navigated through traffic on a Thursday night from Sherman Oaks to downtown Los Angeles to see The Black Queen perform at the Regent. It wasn’t too cold, though that may have been from all the traffic, and something in the air just said that tonight was going to be a good night for some dark and synthy dream pop.

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Album Review: The Black Queen, Fever Daydream

The Black Queen: Fever Daydream
The Black Queen: Fever Daydream

Over the last 4 years, Greg Puciato of The Dillinger Escape Plan has been a busy, busy bee. Aside from constant touring with his main band, and the incredible release of their 2013 work One of Us is the Killer, he somehow found time to form the supergroup Killer Be Killed with Max Cavalera (Sepultura, Nailbomb, Soulfly), Troy Sanders (Mastodon), and Ben Koller (Converge, Mars Volta), and release THEIR self-titled album to pretty strong critical reception. All the while, however, he was writing and piecing together material for something completely different, absolutely outside of the metal genre. I’m talking, of course, about The Black Queen, whose debut album Fever Daydream was released on January 29th of this year.

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Show Review: Mastodon with The Dillinger Escape Plan and Red Fang at The Warfield, 11/3/2011

The hunters
The hunters

With a musical movement like metal, being significant, staying relevant, and still having room to experiment while perfecting your craft is always a difficult combination of skills to possess. The genre calls for solid commitment to unyielding volume, viciously downtuned notes and hellish distortion, with vocals that span from the powerful to the deranged, and lyrics that cross a general spectrum of darkness, mayhem, and more-than-mild discontent. To introduce any additional elements into this equation makes a solution extremely difficult to arrive at, but for the Atlanta metal masterminds of Mastodon, experimentation is simply the bolt of lightning that breathes life into their compositions, which have not at all dwindled in their ferocity from album to album.

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Spinning Platters Weekly Guide to Bay Area Concerts, 6/9/11-6/15/11

kind of playing at Bimbo's...

This week, you are treated to two youtube clips that I make brief appearances in… I think the loyal reader will be happy about that. Are you? Anyways, it’s a pretty good week for shows. Read on:

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