LUNACY: Crypt Ring

The hit single from Resurgence Of Compulsion (Time Castle Recordings), the forthcoming cassette-only LP by Lunacy, solo project of Farout Fang-Tooth’s Nick Kulp. Roy Montgomery (Flying Saucer Attack, The Pin Group), who knows a thing or two about these kind of things, says: “If the post-industrial musicians of the 1980s had stuck to their knitting machines it would have gone like this. Instead, others have had to tunnel their way back through grunge, Britpop and slick indie shoegaze to reconnect the circuits. This is the sound of someone pulling space back to earth. This is a sonic walk-through of landscapes […]

CINEMA: Being Hal Ashby

  LOOKIN’ TO GET OUT (1982, directed by Hal Ashby, 120 minutes U.S.) SECOND HAND HEART (aka THE HAMSTER OF LOVE) (1981, directed by Hal Ashby, 102 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind’s popular tome about American film in the 1970s, Hal Ashby is held up as the quintessential director of his era. Ashby specialized in humanistic tales of outcasts looking for love and struggling to find their place in the world and the seven films he made between 1970 and 1979 make for an unusually rich and diverse body of work, […]

NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t

  FRESH AIR: According to a report by the Vera Institute for Justice, there are more than 3,000 local jails in America, holding more than 730,000 people on any given day. Nancy Fishman, a project director at the Vera Institute, tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that jails “have impacted a huge number of Americans … many more than are impacted by state prisons.” The Vera Institute’s report documents that there are almost 12 million admissions to local jails each year, representing about 9 million people. Most of those jailed, she says, are being held for low-level offenses, such as drug […]

MONKEE BIZNESS: A Q&A With Micky Dolenz

BY JOSH PELTA-HELLER The year 1967 was ground zero for the psychedelic music movement. That year, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour, and the Rolling Stones released three albums — unthinkable in today’s music marketplace —  Flowers, Between The Buttons, and Their Satanic Majesties Request. It was a hell of a year for music, a year that heralded the psychotropic metamorphosis of the pop paradigm. It was also the year that The Monkees sold more records than the Beatles and the Stones combined — an astonishing feat by anyone’s measure. Engineered in a […]

FEEL THE BERN: West Virginia Is For Lovers

  THE ATLANTIC: How did Sanders win on Tuesday, though? West Virginia was once a solid Democratic state, a hotbed of labor unionism that went for Democratic presidential candidates from 1932 on in all but the Republican landslide years of 1956, 1972, and 1984. The state was represented in the Senate by two grand old men of the party, Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller. But more recently, the state has trended Republican, for a variety of reasons: Party realignment around conservative issues has led socially conservative West Virginians toward the GOP; racial animus toward President Obama has hurt the local […]

Win Tix To See Cage The Elephant @ The Mann

  Arguably, the best thing to come out of Kentucky since bourbon, Slint and fried chicken, Cage The Elephant are a gang of punky/trippy blooze-rockers currently wreaking their own brand of testosterone-addled, rock-havoc on the world. Currently, they are as popular as they are obvious — early on you could hear undigested chunks of Pixies, Janes, Pumpkins and White Stripes in the mix — but since when was that a bad thing in rock and/or roll? Besides, they’ve since added ’60s Brit-pop (Kinks, Hollies, Zombies) and ’70s Krautrock (Can, Neu, Amon Duul) to their plunder. Think a Kentucky-fried Dr. Dog. […]

BEING THERE: Del The Funky Homosapien @ UT

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Following an earnest and energetic opening set from Minneapolis rapper Sean Anonymous, Harvard math grad, NYU adjunct professor and turntable acrobat DJ Shiftee helped prime a Sunday crowd convened at Union Transfer to see Del The Funky Homosapien. Having first cut his chops writing lyrics for cousin Ice Cube’s Da Lench Mob crew in California’s hip hop scene in the early 90’s, Del’s first solo record I Wish My Brother George Was Here was produced by Cube in 1991, and buoyed by the success of hit single “Mistadobalina,” a popular critique of cultural inauthenticity that sampled […]

THIS JUST IN: Earth Loves New Radiohead Album

PITCHFORK: So what is new on A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead’s first studio album since 2011’s The King of Limbs? Very little, which to me is what immediately makes it so great. For their ninth studio album, the concept of “newness” doesn’t resonate in the first several listens of this album in the same way that, say, Kid A immediately felt iconoclastic or Hail To The Thief stood in defiance of a political zeitgeist. Instead, Radiohead take a moment of reprise and gather little pieces from their entire career both in and out of the band. There are backwards vocals, […]

RADIOHEAD: Daydreaming

Directed by PT Anderson, and suitably gnomic and Anderson-ian. Was hoping that at the end he would find his electric guitar and, like, play it. Maybe next time. New album drops Sunday.

WORTH REPEATING: All That Glitters Is Not Gold

Illustration by STEPHANIE DAVIDSON via Bloomberg Businessweek BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK: In a cramped suburban Philadelphia office piled high with file folders and documents, Francis Malofiy grabs a steel-stringed acoustic guitar from the corner and places it on his knee. As the 38-year-old lawyer starts to play, the first few notes sound unmistakably like those in Stairway to Heaven. Or do they? Malofiy claims Led Zeppelin filched the iconic arpeggio from a long-forgotten band named Spirit. According to his copyright infringement suit, the tune he’s playing is actually called Taurus, and it was used by one of the biggest rock bands ever […]

ARTSY: Night Of The Igguana

  Like all things Iggy, this is undeniably badass. PREVIOUSLY: There may well be a sound more thrilling than the tub-thumping opening salvo of Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life,” but after five decades of listening closely I’ve yet to hear it. When that song starts, stillness is simply not an option. Resistance is futile. It’s a showstopper, which is why it’s usually the last song of the night. So when Iggy (known to his mother as James Newell Osterberg Jr.) kicked off his concert at the Academy Of Music last night with it, the question hanging in the air was: […]