In 1929, Luis Bunuel directed a film called Un Chien Andalou. Perhaps you’ve heard of it: co-written with then-Surrealist artist and provocateur Salvador Dali and possessed of an infamous opening sequence that still shocks today, it was met with admiration in artistic circles but with much more widespread revulsion from the general public – though not, as is often apocryphally claimed, with the riots which would eventually greet Bunuel’s second collaboration with Dali, 1930′s L’Age d’Or. Look at the first two films by this …

Back in 2001, there was still mystery left in the Pixies. Frank Black (not, as he seems to call himself now, Charles Thompson) had only just reached the point where he could say the name of his former band out loud; he still hadn’t spoken to his ex-bandmate Kim Deal in almost a decade. Whispers of a reunion were growing louder, sure, but certainly nobody I knew was ready to believe them. And when an article appeared in Mojo that March, it was still …

Of all the overused, overemphasized, overrated terms in modern indie music, “honesty” must be close to the top. An unfortunate outgrowth of the 1980s’ integrity-obsessed first wave of alternative rock (in the same way that gonorrhea can be an unfortunate outgrowth of sex), “honesty” has served as many a wannabe critic’s highest standard of quality, its absence the cruelest and most demeaning of epithets.
Take a perfectly good, kick-ass rock’n’roll band, who maybe just happen to like a little semi-ironic Spandex in their stage gear, …

I’ve said it once; I’ve said it a million times – there is an art to releasing an interesting and good live album. Look at the Reigning Sound’s recent Live at Goner Records; that record is absolutely necessary for any Reigning Sound fan, as well as anyone who has wanted to get into the band. It does a fantastic job of capturing the rock and roll howl of Greg Cartwright and the high-energy sounds of the Reigning Sound in concert. But enough about one …

Yesterday, the Pea Pod staff attacked Clear Channel’s underwater fortress. Aaron took advantage of his diminutive stature by climbing into a heating duct. He crawled through the castle walls until he came upon the secret radio control room, which was filled with guardian robots. Aaron poked his head out of a ceiling vent and coated the robots with molten lead. In the uproar that followed, the rest of us Podders were able to shoot, stab, and knee-face-bash our way to …

There are few bands in recent underground music history who command – and deserve – as much respect as Mudhoney. Survivors of the late-’80s/early-’90s Seattle explosion, singer Mark Arm, guitarist Steve Turner, drummer Dan Peters, and bassist Matt Lukin (replaced in 2001 by Guy Maddison) have been at it since 1988, when their seminal EP Superfuzz Bigmuff accidentally helped to father grunge with its blend of fuzz-drenched Stooges dynamics and ironically detached punk nihilism. In the years since that debut, they’ve plowed an …

It would be in the best interests of both writer and reader to get our ground facts straight here: you are about to read a review of an album of jazz interpretations of classic and semi-classic pop songs, drawing heavily from the nineteen-nineties, played by a vibraphone, piano, and bass trio of three anonymous guys, one of whom happens to be responsible for 1998’s alternative-rock radio favorite “Closing Time.”
To their credit, publicists for The New Standards’ self-titled album readily acknowledge all of this.
There’s …

It would be in the best interests of both writer and reader to get our ground facts straight here: you are about to read a review of an album of jazz interpretations of classic and semi-classic pop songs, drawing heavily from the nineteen-nineties, played by a vibraphone, piano, and bass trio of three anonymous guys, one of whom happens to be responsible for 1998’s alternative-rock radio favorite “Closing Time.”
To their credit, publicists for The New Standards’ self-titled album readily acknowledge all of this.
There’s …