Musical brothers are not known for getting along. Remember the epic battles between Oasis’s Noel and Liam Gallagher? For that matter, it seems like almost every time families get involved together musically, shit gets fucked up. The Jackson Five were notoriously rumoured to share their sexual partners, and are thought to have been abused by their father, Joe Jackson. Also, speaking of parental abuse, how about the Shaggs? Those talentless (but utterly entertaining) Wiggins sisters were forced to leave school by their father …

The first track off The Sounds’ sophomore effort, Dying to Say This to You, is entitled “Song with a Mission.” So to start, let me just get this out of the way: no band whose album art resembles an American Apparel ad as closely as this one should ever be allowed to lay claim to a “mission.” Ever.
Unless, of course, that mission is just to make a helluva catchy pop album… in which case our hypothetical band would be in mighty good company. Right …

Ladies, ladies, ladies…when will you ever learn? Rock singers are appealing, sure: they sweat and they strut and they wear their jeans skin-tight (the better to accentuate their stuffed crotches). Maybe they’re even a little sensitive, too, with their liner note dedications and their power ballads. But once the break-up comes around — and come it will — you’ll be spending the rest of your life hearing about what a bitch you were, and it’s safe to say that no amount of free backstage …

So far, 2006 has been a year mostly in love with the past. Major buzz bands such as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are still in the process of attempting to update the wiry post-punk and early college rock of the 1970s and ’80s, and indie kids all over the world have eaten this trend up with a silver spoon. Yet, oddly, one of the best albums of this year, The Gossip’s Standing in the Way of Control, has been ignored amidst all …

If you’ve never heard Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On before, I suggest you go do so immediately. I think it’s an album that everyone can get the same vibes from: hazy, fuzzy, depressing, a funk record with a tone so different from other funk records that it’s always surprising. There’s a Riot Goin’ On is simply end-of-an-era coked out genius – and if any one of Sly & The Family Stone’s albums deserves a book written about …

They started as just another satellite in Josh Homme’s Desert Sessions orbit; eight years and one messy divorce later, the Eagles of Death Metal are a full-fledged “movement and phenomenon onto itself,” as mustachioed singer/guitarist Jesse “Boots Electric” Hughes puts it. We talked to Hughes for fifteen minutes at the cusp of the Eagles’ spring tour with the Strokes, touching on everything from groupies to girl-phobic indie kids and Rick Springfield. The resulting interview may not be as lengthy as some of the …

When people imagine music by an acknowledged gay male, they usually expect it to be filled with stage theatricality and a tone of angst that comes from the travails of being young and gay. Songs such as the Bronski Beat’s “Need a Man Blues” instantly come to mind when pondering the identity of the openly gay man in music. With its lonely vocals, shattering falsetto vocal range, and darkest blue melody, “Need a Man Blues” captures the gloom of wanting someone, anyone; but at …

There are a number of roles to play in the realm of pop culture, but it’s rare that we give much thought to what is, perhaps, the most important one. Entertainment media is nothing without the fan. The fan is the one who allows a work to succeed. If you have no fan base, your efforts will most certainly fail.
Yet even that idea isn’t so simple: there are your standard fans — the people who make an effort to tune in to a TV show …

Sondre Lerche does not fit into my stereotypes of a Norwegian musician. He does not play death or black metal. He does not kill his fellow bandmates. Nor has he ever (at least to this reviewer’s knowledge) burned down a church in the names of Satan and rock and roll. And until now, it’s never mattered: Lerche’s prior releases, Faces Down and Two Way Monologue, were artful pop records which cemented the then-teenager as a musical phenom. Those albums found the right mixture …

A few weeks ago, the Sex Pistols answered their inevitable nomination to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with what many fans trumpeted as an especially “punk” gesture: an open letter, hand-scrawled and atrociously spelled, declaring their contempt for the corporate institution and vehemently declining to appear at the ceremony. And it was pretty punk of them, insomuch as our concept of “punk” in the 21st century has been informed by mass-produced bondage pants, vague notions of “sticking it to the man” …