I sit on the curb reading the new issue of CityBEAT while Joey Carr smokes crystal in the back of Kurt’s van. The sun is setting over Downtown, and from the Broadway hill it’s a wide, sweeping, panoramic view of the harbor and the airport, the silver gray office buildings with the light of dusk MORE…
On this day in 2013, a true beast was born into the world. The Opera LP by ZEUS! is a heavyhitting motherfucker (that hits heavier than most motherfuckers), and does so with just two people (and a cameo from Justin Pearson of The Locust, Retox, Planet B, and Deaf Club on the second track, the MORE…
Holy Molar will ruin hardcore for you. This is a good thing. Let it burn. Let some weird new phoenix rise from the ashes. After the deluge of Molar, most hardcore ends up sounding basic as fuck. It sounds cookiecutter. Generic. Samey. Two guitars, bass, a singer, and drums? Come on, where’s the adventure, the MORE…
Avenida Revolución, Tijuana, Mexico, August 4th, 2001. Walking past the leather coat shops, the colorful blankets and boxing marionettes for sale, display cases of knives, rows of women’s shoes, tourist t-shirts, Ropa Americana, telenovela magazines on the walls of a blue-painted plywood newsstand, lottery tickets strung up with brown twine, a marble chess set of MORE…
I still remember the heat in the air at a Plot show. The desperate, humid pit and kids crawling up on stage to dance. Seeing the Plot play live was more like a zombification ritual or an unholy tent revival than a show. It was loud and sweaty and ecstatic, and so and so making MORE…
Excerpt from the book: The last time I went to the apartment on Zanzibar Court everyone other than me dropped acid. It was Shane and Jason, Andy, his cousin Todd Barney, Todd Barney’s new girlfriend KellyLee, and Richard the Famous Bike Jumper. The paper tabs had smiling cartoon rabbits on them. It was a week MORE…
I have often thought of Three One G as a label that has (whether intentionally or not) curated a parallel universe of abnormal, radical pop-music. Bands like Holy Molar, Doomsday Student, Planet B, Chinese Stars, and Hot Nerds in particular write such catchy songs you might imagine them on some fucked-up bizzaro universe version of MORE…
You walk along the Mission Beach boardwalk in the morning and it’s seagulls pecking the remains of ketchup-spattered French fries or the ribs of leftover pizza crusts and it’s June gloom overcasting the sky and the packs of bodies walking past you or on bikes, tall girls on rollerblades, teenagers on skateboards and their wheels MORE…
The world in which we live is a bullshit world and because we live in a bullshit world we must search without pause for things that are not bullshit. There is a certain growing insubstantiality to life on our planet as we continue to hide ourselves behind screens, seek technological pleasure, and hunt for new MORE…
It’s strange what sticks with you. Take a year, any year. Of all the songs you listened to, how many truly became a part of that year’s tapestry? How many are branded on you (or into you) and are now inseparable with the time–a permanent part of the soundtrack, as indelible and true as your MORE…