// Category Archive for: Music

Top Five Vampire Songs

By Lisa Anderson

As Halloween approaches, we start hearing certain seasonal songs like “Monster Mash” and “Spooky”; we may also dust off our copies of albums by supernaturally-themed acts like Rob Zombie. However, I would like to share my list of the top five vampire songs that aren’t really about vampires.

Some of these are from my vamp-loving early adolescence, but they all taught me that a song can be about more than one thing. They may be heard at any time of year, but scratch the surface, and they still remind me of everyone’s favorite children of the night. (The last one? Is just for fun.)
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Driving Me Backwards (Apologies To Brian Eno)

By Jimmy Ether

As a kid, backward masking gave me chills. But, I was also intrigued by the idea of spinning records backwards to see what crazy messages I might hear. The creepiest one to me at the time was Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” As the urban legend goes, Jimmy Page purchased Aleister Crowley’s mansion and was, effectively, living with Satan. He then encoded backwards messages of this experience into “Stairway to Heaven”. If you play the fifth verse of the song backwards, you hear an account of life with this terrifying Prince of Darkness.
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Big Star, Keep An Eye On The Sky

By Kaye Telle

The mythical proportions of Big Star are hard to deny, so I won’t. Big Star are a treasure worth (re)discovering; they have gems worth seeking out and examining over and over, for years to come.
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Unclear On The Concept: A Brief History Of The Concept Album

By Christian Lipski

I’m sure it’s not just me, but whenever I start to write a non-fiction article about X, I always want to start with “Webster’s Dictionary defines X as. . . ” I’m sure it’s the lazy high school student in me, but in this case, it’s rather pointless to try to define the term “concept album,” because the definitions are so broad. My first response would be “um, an album made up of songs that contain a common theme,” and that’s an acceptable definition. What’s a “theme”? An album of songs that all start with the letter A would be a theme, and would therefore be a concept album. It’s a weak definition, but there are so many different ways to create such an album, it all turns out OK in the end.
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Way Past Almost Golden: Courtney Love In The 2000s

By Emily Carney

It’s late 2009, and the endless enigma of the singer and musician we know as Courtney Love has still not spawned a new album or a record deal. The general populace has now come to view Courtney Love as the rock version of Anna Nicole Smith. She has been regularly photographed by paparazzi looking like an anorexic, drugged out mess. In one recent video from TMZ she ranted on for a few minutes about things that made no sense, and syringes were seen in her handbag (I seriously doubt she has any form of diabetes).
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Warped Tour in Kansas City: I’m Too Old For This Shit

By Danny R. Phillips

Prior to August 4th, it had been eleven years since I had last joined the tattooed masses as an attendee of The Vans’ Warped Tour. I was younger then in both body and mind. Standing on the boiling pavement this year watching the crowd pass me like a pierced, dyed, rainbow bedazzled tsunami, I saw two distinct classes, scratch that, generations, go by.

One was an older, punk-appreciating culture with fading tattoos and greying hair that grew up on Bad Religion, The Descendents, Fugazi, Bad Brains, The Zero Boys, and the Circle Jerks (I, obviously fall into group A) and the other was the day glo “skittle core kids” who worship The Devil Wears Prada and Attack! Attack! like they were the Dead Milkmen or The Ramones.

Dragging myself between five stages and countless bands, it dawned on me (and my trusty photographer) that at 15, the Vans’ Warped Tour was experiencing a midlife crisis of sorts and was, in fact, no longer the festival of years gone by. It is clear that I am a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit named Hot Topic. Like Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon flicks, “I am too old for this shit!”
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Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds, Dracula Boots

By Julie Finley

Kid Congo Powers (a.k.a. Brian Tristan) has been around. . . and around! If you know the name, you know his pedigree! If you are reading this, you probably dig at least one of the following: The Cramps, The Gun Club, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Congo Norvell, Knoxville Girls, Kid & Khan, Fur Bible, Botanica, Mark Eitzel, The Divine Horsemen, The Angels of Light, Die Haut, etc. (or possibly all of them). He’s sort of a renegade musician—he shows up in a lot of things—but in the past few years, he’s finally doing his own thing, where he’s the focus.
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Jay Reatard, Watch Me Fall

By Less Lee Moore

Maybe he’s grown up a bit since the days when the Memphis music scene dubbed him “Little Lord Punkleroy,” but thankfully, Jay Reatard hasn’t become boring.

In a recent article on the Matador Records blog, he noted:

“A lot of bands these days, they approach the making of an album like it’s collecting songs, they don’t think about how all of the songs are going to work together. They sequence their albums on iTunes, wondering what songs sound best next to each other rather than putting them together as they were written. That’s not an album.”

If these songs were written in the order they appear on the album, then Watch Me Fall is a great achievement for Jay Reatard. If you listen closely enough, you can actually hear the sound of an artist evolving.
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Bat For Lashes, Two Suns

By Julie Finley

I’d heard of Bat For Lashes last year, and the name didn’t grab me, so I ignored it. I had inadvertently absorbed the info that the act was critically acclaimed. Big Deal, right? So when I was on vacation earlier this year in Dublin, I saw promo posters in almost all of the record stores I went into. . . still ignored it!

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The Darkest Of The Hillside Thickets: An Interview With Toren Atkinson

Interviewed by Megashaun

I first heard of The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets at last year’s Penny Arcade Expo. The band was there and had a booth set up because they were playing at one of the concerts during the convention. Around this time, their song, “Shhh…” was introduced as downloadable content for the video game Rock Band. Although initially drawn to them by the visual aesthetic of their album designs and the scruffy yet handsome appearance of the band’s members, I was pleased to find out upon listening to their album Cthulhu Strikes Back that the band has a great deal of musical talent and that their music has a lot more going for it than catchy hooks and bellowing vocals.

When I later listened to The Shadow Out of Tim, I was even more impressed. The album’s dark undertones are a perfect complement to its catchy, even poppy, foundation. It’s also just a little bit scary, but more importantly it kicks a lot of ass.

The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets are known for their energetic live shows. While I’ve sadly never had the opportunity to see them play live, I can tell just from looking at photos that the shows must be a great deal of fun. That, and Toren Atkinson, lead singer of the band, tells a good story about the origins of their live shtick.

Photo from thickets.net
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