It shouldn’t take an especially active reader to see that the Modern Pea Pod tends not to cover music that gets played on the radio. And I’m not gonna lie: part of that comes down to our own personal tastes. But another reason why we don’t usually talk to bands who get radio airplay is because the bands who get radio airplay don’t usually want to talk to us. I mean, seriously, if you were 50 Cent, James Blunt, Red Hot Chili Peppers or …

For a lot of girls, there is always that one best friend they can count on. The friend who you’ve had since at least high school, who knows everything about you. The friend you’ve done really stupid things with; the friend who, even in the midst of a giant storm of annoyances, you automatically called when everything was going wrong; and the one friend (who you aren’t fucking) that you can stay up all night with and not get grumpy. So imagine a day …

Probably because we don’t get a lot of crap records in the mail and we’re all understanding and willing to treat the music we listen to on its own terms, few albums here at the Modern Pea Pod headquarters have received negative reviews. Just check the archive: a lot of digital ink spilled over music that we, for the most part, really enjoy. The Trews’ sophomore album, Den of Thieves, is unfortunately one of those crap records we try to stay away from. It’s …

The hardest thing about addressing the Raconteurs’ Broken Boy Soldiers is distancing the band from its parts. There is, of course, Little Jack Lawrence on bass. Little Jack is from both the Greenhornes and Blanche. He’s a good bassist, and he also looks a lot like he could be Jack White’s shy little brother who would never hit anyone. Then there’s Patrick Keeler, who’s also a member of the Greenhornes. And I’m just going to admit it right now, I love the Greenhornes. I …

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 …

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 …

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 …

As anyone who has had the misfortune of taking a postmodern theory course knows, nothing can escape its history. And usually, this historical entrapment is the biggest downfall of most modern music: singers, as we know, have a knack for getting ensnared in the coil of their influences. So with that in mind, you might be tempted to ask who is this Destroyer, with his Tyrannosaurus Rex and Ziggy Stardust feel?
Well, listen up kids: despite the fact that this album was loved by …

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 …

I remember vividly the first time I stumbled across Nardwuar the Human Serviette. It was the summer of 2002, and I, like many music listeners, was just embarking on what would be an ongoing love affair with the White Stripes. I’d bought three of their records — White Blood Cells, De Stijl and a bootleg of the 2001 Peel Sessions — watched their buzzmaking MTV Movie Awards performance, and even seen them in concert for the first time, at Chene Park in Detroit …