Picture unrelated.

[Painting by WILHELM SASNAL] BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER If Peaches never existed, she would have surely invented herself. In fact, that’s exactly how Merrill Beth Nisker, a 41-year-old former drama teacher from Ontario, transformed into Peaches, electroclash’s preeminent erotic provocateur/party animal. For the last 10 years, she’s been transgressing the boundaries of good taste and common decency with album titles like Impeach My Bush and trashy retrofitted 80s dance music that advocates fornication as the palliative cure for the pain and boredom of modern existence. In the process, she has built a swelling cult of gender freaks, hipster […]

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER  It’s been 25 years since Spinal Tap launched its hilariously disastrous, albeit fictional, North American tour in support of its equally ill-fated and fictional album, Smell the Glove. Mercifully, the band’s Unwigged & Unplugged tour — which touched down Thursday night at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside – seems to be going much better: rave reviews and sold-out theaters without a single drummer losing his life, all of which is a big step up from second billing to a puppet show at an amusement park or the Air Force base-dance circuit. Part mock-career retrospective, […]

I’M YOUR FAN: Leonard Cohen on bended knee, Academy of Music, last night [Photo by MICHAEL T. REGAN] BY JONATHAN VALANIA The Great Man glides onstage in black pinstripes and a fedora like a gangster cantor, double-breasted and tie-less, his crisp creamy blue shirt buttoned-up to the neck David Lynch-style. He seems to walk on air. He was born like this, he had no choice, he was born with the gift of a golden voice. Now his friends are gone and his hair is grey, he aches in the places he used to play. After all these years, he’s still […]

Leonard Cohen plays the Academy of Music tonight! Look for a full report tomorrow, including a MICHAEL T. REGAN slideshow. You lucky ducks! ROCK SNOB ENCYCLOPEDIA: Cohen, Leonard — Patron saint of life’s beautiful losers. With a lyrical acuity far beyond those of mortal men and a baritone that sinks lower than the submarine in Das Boot, Leonard Cohen has forged a craggy reputation as the quintessential singer/songwriter’s singer/songwriter–not bad for a guy who, technically speaking, can’t even sing. […]  Having established himself in the literary world, Cohen began seeking entree into the music scene. The timing could not have […]

BY DAVE ALLEN Tonight, Philadelphia is privileged to host a tour date by Ghost, a Japanese band making its return from a self-imposed American exile. They vowed not to return until after George W. Bush was no longer in office, and, true to its name, Ghost disappeared. We have indeed been deprived of something elegantly nutso. Though polystylistic in the extreme, Ghost’s music has an overall scuzzy and metallic vibe, with head-spinning reverb and lingering, hard-bitten distortion. Many tracks feature tightly coiled repetitions, like some of the finest moments of Tool and Radiohead, but tempered by a broken-down and dusty […]

[Click image to activate Internets] BY BRENDAN SKWIRE How the hell did an old school hardcore punk kid like me get into old timey music? That’s a pretty short story.  Even back in the day, I always loved older hardcore better than newer stuff. Youth of Today was fine, but Minor Threat was better (someday i will tell the story of how I made Ian Mackaye lose his temper), and the Sex Pistols was even better than that and so on and so on. The fact is, I’ve always loved old shit, so when I got a little older and […]

[Photo by PAVLA KOPECNA] BY DIANCA POTTS & KYLEE MESSNER New Yorkers Za Za took the stage of a sold out Barbary Wednesday night with the intention to hypnotize the crowd with marching band drumbeats and eerie pop vocals. Deeming their current tour “awesome,” the band started off their set with “Sooner or Later,” a tune overpowered by lead guitar distortion and a carefree bassist. Echoing from one song to the next, the band’s message was clear—play loud, look aloof, and make sure the crowd knows you are the best at what you do. (It doesn’t hurt when the much-anticipated […]