// Category Archive for: Music

Waxing Nostalgic: METAL MAYHEM! with Mötley Crüe, “Looks That Kill”

By Jeffery X Martin

Gather around, children. The following is a true story.

The year was 1983.

The most popular band in the world released the biggest album of their career. It was also, arguably, the worst album of their career. How they went from songs based on famous novels to bad poetry about dinosaurs is still beyond me. At the same time, a little metal band from Los Angeles was making waves by not only cranking out killer riffs, but by painting themselves as Satan-worshipping post-apocalyptic satyrs.

I was thirteen years old, a sweet church-going boy, and I had cleverly squirreled away enough money to purchase both of these albums on cassette. I was far too concerned about the coolness issue involved with these new additions to my musical collection. I had to have Synchronicity because everyone had it. I wanted Shout at the Devil because “Looks that Kill” was stuck in my head, slowly driving me mad.

This was the beginning of the Satanic Panic era. Heavy metal was coming under attack from concerned groups of parents for its sexual content. Religious groups were mortified by the licentiousness in the lyrics and perceived glorification of violence and sexual perversion. Ozzy and Judas Priest would end up going on trial. Frank Zappa would appear before a Senate committee, telling them to keep their white-gloved hands off our rock and roll. They were dark times for heavy music.

I was on the path to becoming a Christian minister.

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Waxing Nostalgic: METAL MAYHEM! with Night Ranger, “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me”

By Jeffery X Martin

When did the Eighties really begin for you? I like to think that, if you were alive then, you had a musical moment when you knew that decade was going to be different. Maybe there was some kind of herald, a psychopomp guiding the Seventies to its disco-dug grave, a ray of strange black light that entered your ears and dug into your soul. Maybe you had an epiphany.

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Upcoming Art Show: Vicki Berndt, Idle Worship: Jesus Camp and Drag Keanes

By Less Lee Moore

In 2008, I conducted an interview with the fabulous artist and all-around amazing lady Vicki Berndt. In it, we discussed her artwork, photography, fanzines, fandom, the punk rock aesthetic, and much more.

La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles is presenting an exhibit of Vicki’s work that runs from Friday, May 3 through Sunday, June 2. She’ll be present at the artist reception on Friday, May 3 from 8 to 11 p.m.

For more information on Vicki and her art, be sure to check out her guest appearance on the “Over Under Sideways Down” podcast on LuxuriaMusic. It aired on Wednesday, April 24 and you can listen to the show on the LuxuriaMusic website (hour one and hour two).

La Luz de Jesus Gallery is located at 4633 Hollywood Blvd. In Los Angeles, CA. You can contact the gallery at 323-666-7667 or via their website at www.laluzdejesus.com. Take a look at the exhibit
online, too!

Check out more photos of Vicki’s art and her studio.

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Music Review: George Jones, Jones Country/You’ve Still Got A Place In My Heart (Reissue)

By Melissa Bratcher

George Jones was called “the greatest voice in country music.” This is not hyperbole. He could make you feel so much with a crack of his voice, the swell or pull back on a phrase. He was masterful.

The liner notes for Jones Country/You’ve Still Got A Place In My Heart mention the miracle that he was alive and well in 2013 and planning a farewell show. I received this disc the day before he died. Irony is a wicked mistress.

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Music Review: Melvins, Everybody Loves Sausages

By Less Lee Moore

Melvins—the “the” is silent—are one of those bands who are permanently on the list of bands I’ve been meaning to get into. Everything of theirs I’ve heard I’ve enjoyed and I’ve seen them live twice (both times were outstanding). I even have a few of their albums. But I’ve never crossed over into the “must own everything” level of fandom. Although Everybody Loves Sausages is an album of cover songs, it may have finally pushed me over that precipice.

Cover songs are tricky. Why bother covering something unless you’re going to make it better or add something special? There is a third reason, though it’s not the most popular: introduce people to bands that they’ve never heard before. As an album, Everybody Loves Sausages hits all those marks.

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Music Review: Big Black Delta, Big Black Delta

By Less Lee Moore

The claim that music with keyboards and synthesizers isn’t “real music” or is just crap has gone on long past its sell-by date. It was tired in the ’80s; now it’s just embarrassing. If music makes you feel something on a gut level—or hell, if it just makes you want to hit the dance floor—then who cares if it’s got synths, keyboards, or a didgeridoo?

The anti-keyboard bridge would probably break out the torches and pitchforks for Big Black Delta. Jonathan Bates has taken Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound to its most synthesized, processed extreme. It’s not just that Big Black Delta’s music features a preponderance of electronic sounds, it’s that the sounds include mountains, oceans, and skies.

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Music Review: Meat Puppets, Rat Farm

By Danny R. Phillips

The Meat Puppets are not only icons of the alternative/punk/underground music scenes; they are like fine wines: The band and their music just keep getting better with age. The latest from the Kirkwood Brothers, Rat Farm, is perhaps their finest, the band’s most playful and diverse offering since releasing Up On The Sun in 1985.

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Music Review: The Armoury Show, Waiting For The Floods (Reissue)

By Jeffery X Martin

In 1985, The Armoury Show took Britain by storm, billed as the first punk supergroup. By 1987, they had fallen off the radar completely, leaving only one album behind. Cherry Red’s reissue of that album, Waiting For The Floods, is a beautiful shiny thing, a welcome rediscovery of a band that faded out far too quickly.

Consisting of former members of Magazine, The Skids, and Siouxsie & the Banshees (John McGeoch!), The Armoury Show served up gorgeously slick cathedral Goth with strangely danceable grooves. Theirs was not music for the stand and shuffle crowd. You could dress up in your funereal best and still sway your anthemic hips, maybe even crack a smile.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Martini Ranch, “How Can the Labouring Man Find Time for Self-Culture?”

By Jeffery X Martin

The Eighties were self-referential as soon as they began, simultaneously creating and copying themselves, everything instantly ironic and dependent on everything else. The determinedly plastic and disposable nature of most American New Wave music showed this better than most things; helium songs, with the fluffy substance of a dandelion spore, floating through the earholes of bright girls with side pony-tails and chunky necklaces.

Cleverly, the band Martini Ranch took this aspect of the genre to task in their 1986 single, “How Can the Labouring Man Find Time for Self-Culture?” The lyrics take a firmly humanistic, proletariat stance. I am a human, I am not a number, yet the demands of the modern work-a-day world keep me from ascending Olympus and becoming the god I am destined to be.

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Music Review: The Chapin Sisters, A Date With The Everly Brothers

By Less Lee Moore

Like The Everly Brothers, The Chapin Sisters come from a musical family. Their father is Grammy-award-winning musician Tom Chapin; their uncle was folk singer and humanitarian Harry Chapin. This pedigree shows in their most recent release, A Date With The Everly Brothers, an album of 14 cover songs by the beloved duo.

A Date With The Everly Brothers focuses on the songs released by the siblings between 1957 and 1961, the most commercially successful period in their career. About half of the songs are Everly originals; most of the rest are Felice and Boudleaux Bryant compositions from the brothers’ tenure on Cadence Records in the late ’50s.

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