Past Stories
The Bells’ Toll on Rock & Roll
Musically we lean toward the heavy, always have and probably always will, which is why Led Zeppelin trumps the Beatles in our record-collecting obsession and the deep-Sabbath grunge sound forever satisfies. Having never e...
Liquored up and Lacquered Down
</p>Within the oft shameful recidivism of rock & roll bands who uphold a commitment to "retro"-based music, Dixie-fried goons Southern Culture on the Skids stand gloriously apart. Although resolutely ...
Sea Change
Normally, when an otherwise predictable band wants to wiggle out of a niche they bring in a perception-elevating string section as a sign of their utter maturity and epic sophistication (Guns N’ Roses, Earlimart, Metallic...
WILD MAN WOODY!
Woody Allen, the internationally renowned filmmaker who can lay claim to having produced a trove of oft-hilarious, nuanced and—despite the fact that his own whine-happy persona is more often than not the main attr...
Band of the Week
Divide the Day seamlessly fuses guitar-driven punk rock riffs and hardcore intensity with melodic arrangements, and there is a constant battle between soothing, harmonic vocals and wrath-induced hardcore growls and scream...
Band of the Week
Personal drama and scheduling conflicts have a way of keeping good bands from ever releasing recorded testaments to their musical ingenuity. But if you’re IE local Janette Kantzalis (of The Chubbies fame), you’d get...
SHEIK YERBOUTI LIVES!
The offspring of famous singer/musicians rarely do their daddies proud. If you’ve heard the juniors Sinatra and Hank, you know what I mean. But Dweezil Zappa is paying tribute to his father in a way that does justic...
Band of the Week
Most post-rock or proggy rock bands blur the line between boredom and apathy just enough to get away with pushing album after album of formulaic songs that strive to be a dissertation on the State of Mopey Nation, but ins...
Who’s Martin Brown?
January 26 marks the Third Annual Inland Empire Music Awards, held in the Key Club inside that fabulous desert monolith known as Casino Morongo. There’s something to be said about how this little awards shindig has ...
Fairlane Rock
Rock & roll, the frantic sound that sent Western Civilization into paroxysms of outrage and revulsion, has become such a well-established commodity that it’s easy to forget how the whole damn mess came into bein...
Band of the Week
Bands that aim for an avant-garde kind of rock are generally too artsy for their own good. There’s something to be said for music that strives to break down artistic barriers and musical conventions, but the music t...
No Hat Act
If the slick, soulless drivel that passes for contemporary country music is enough to make you puke, despair not. David Serby has arrived.
In the mold of Harlan Howard, Merle Haggard and Dwight Yoakam, this appealing sing...
THE FLUFFER
For anyone who missed the day in puberty school when us hormonally-hazed teens with ample acne and angst got together and collectively formed our attitudes toward sex, here’s a recap: sex is cool. Not cool in a Jame...
Moon to Versai
Moon To Versai crank out playful instrumental pop ditties that oscillate between sugary-sweet, upbeat Game Boy music, dreamy, mopey progressions and vibrato-driven surf sounds. They can also aurally describe frenetic anxi...
Cars, Hip-Hop, Hot Chicks
Get ready, Killa4nia dance crew—the Supacrew is coming to stomp all over you. Or drive over you.
Or maybe it’ll be the other way around. Whatever happens, these two B-boy crews have been studying each other&rs...
Mad Marge & the Stonecutters
Every time a female-fronted band starts making waves in an otherwise stagnant musical genre, there are bound to be chock-full-o-hormones rock nerds creeping out from their labyrinth of dusty, forgotten records to point ou...
AFI: WTF?
The last chords of pop-punk are whining out their death gasp, and not a second too soon. Maybe that’s wishful thinking on our part, but the last thing we need is another band bleating melodic, sound-alike songs bemo...
Bum Rush the Show
For some of us (OK, me), our first exposure to the theatrical world was when our girlfriend took us to a college production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. We tried to get into its musical antics and pervasive use o...
Deep in the Night
The post-war era rhythm & blues explosion, which roiled American society as it seduced a generation of white teenagers into the Devil’s Musical Den—and gloriously laid the foundation for rock & roll&md...
WORRIED MINDS
What makes the bands in some college towns so much better than others? Kinda depends on how you define exactly what a college town is. Riverside has its ubiquitous UCR, and San Bernardino has their CSUSB, but really, thes...
Call Me Crash
At first listen, San Dimas-based Call Me Crash might sound like your typical teen angst band. With their lyrics about suicide and various other melancholy subjects, and whiney, emo-inspired vocals, it’s an easy mist...
Howling, Naked, Guttural
Against Me—and yeah, we’ll refrain from using the exclamation point they normally employ in their name for this article—should’ve been the band that saved punk rock.
Their early releases captured a...
Band of the Week
Most hardcore/screamo rock isn’t exactly inventive. It doesn’t need to be—add guitars, drums and shrieking vocals, heat and serve. But Fontana three-piece Needless To Say bring a creative fervor to the genre, ...
Band of the Week
The post-rock thing has been done to death, seemingly with no shortage of bands eager to jump onto a genre whose members bear little resemblance to one another, except for song structure. The term is attributed to music journal...
Band of the Week
The problem with most retro bands is that they lack the originality of their predecessors, and merely offer a rehash of old musical ideas that are neither as fun or vivacious as the original. But not if you’re Riverside f...
Kings of Bad-Ass
The saga of ZZ Top—the opulently whiskered, techno-trimmed and demonically heavy rocking trio that earned pop culture immortality with their mid-’80s status as Video Lords of MTV—is an extraordinary tal...
Coachella With Twang
When the Stagecoach festival finally kicks into gear this weekend, it’ll be the first such major country music festival held in Southern California in more than a decade. While some might consider this jumbo scale round-u...
Coachella Gone Country
COUNTRY, ALT-COUNTRY AND THE WHOLE DAMN MESS
The Empire Polo Field in Indio, still recovering from the great freak-fest that was Coachella, hosted Stagecoach entirely different beast last weekend, as some of the nation’s ...
