Getting under your skin has been Pop. 1280's business since 2009, when the Brooklyn-based industrial/noise outfit issued the appropriately titled "Bedbugs" 7-inh. Led by singer Chris Bug and guitarist Ivan Lip, the band's commitment to provocation knows no bounds: We suppose you could do worse than open your debut album by shouting "Two dogs fucking!" but we'd have to comb through some pretty dark corners of eMusic's catalog in order to suggest something more foul.… more »
And then there were two — namely, after the suicide of bassist Sean Stewart last year, a pair of compatriot makers of moodily constrained electronic music known as Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang. The two of them had been members of HTRK since the group first got together in Melbourne, Australia, in 2003, but the band would be a different one with part of its heart removed. Nonetheless, they marshaled on and completed work already… more »
While most people associate Nicolas Cage with flaccid popcorn flicks like National Treasure, Alex Zhang Hungtai still relishes his mercurial role as Sailor Ripley, the Elvis-quoting outlaw who dives straight off the deep end in one of David Lynch's most divisive movies, 1990's Wild At Heart.
Fittingly, Ripley is one of the many role models for the central character in Hungtai's breakthrough record as Dirty Beaches. Badlands is a concept album that's inspired by everything from… more »
Around 1978, a handful of bands in downtown New York City who all knew each other tried to answer the central question of post-punk: "why does rock music have to sound a certain way?" The groups that came to be identified as the "no wave" scene rejected every kind of orthodoxy of pop music, from tunefulness to conventional instrumental skill - what the Ramones and other punk bands were doing, by contrast, was practically bourgeois… more »
It's Halloween, which is the best holiday out of all the holidays that don't involve presents. On Halloween, everyone pretends to be afraid of ghosts, which are generally thought to be the spirits of dead people who, for some reason or another, are caught in between worlds.
I'm not sure I believe in ghosts. It's probably all the Scooby Doo episodes I watched as a kid; ghosts were never real, but rather just Old Mr. Thompson… more »
