TEANECK, NJ—Mexicali Live is an excellent venue for an event featuring an audio-visual performance group like The Birthday Massacre. Besides an exceptional sound system, it features a wide-open standing room with dinner table seating along one side wall and in a loft-like second level at the far end of…
Skinny Puppy: HanDover
This is the 11th complete album by the preeminent electro-industrial group Skinny Puppy, and it comes across as an unfortunate mellowing of the style of this usually boisterous, eccentric band. Skinny Puppy has a tradition of naming their songs with puns and neologisms. Thus we find tracks with names…
Peter Murphy: Ninth
When the seminal Gothic rock band Bauhaus broke up in 1983, the founding members went off in different directions. Frontman Peter Murphy went solo and released three albums: Deep, Holy Smoke and Cascade that, while more melodious, represented a continuation of the dark tradition on which the original band…
Mark Sinnis: The Undertaker In My Rearview Mirror
Mark Sinnis, frontman for cemetery and western band Ninth House, has released an album that contains new compositions, covers and updated acoustic versions of previously recorded Ninth House favorites, countrified even further with honky-tonk piano, electric and slide guitars. Sinnis continues expounding his obsession with the many ways that…
Peter Gabriel @ Susquehanna Bank Center
CAMDEN, NJ—The renowned father of World Beat, singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel appeared at this 25,000-seat venue which serves the greater Philadelphia area on his New Blood Tour, accompanied by a 40-piece orchestra. Apparently Gabriel, who in decades past founded the prog-rock band Genesis, has abandoned rock music for the moment…
Screening of ‘Living The American Nightmare: The Story Of A Rock Star’ @ Darress Theatre
BOONTON, NJ—An exclusive, first screening of Living The American Nightmare was held Friday, June 10 at the historic Darress Theatre in Boonton, NJ, hosted by Pawl BaZile and Myke Hideous, and attended by around 100 guests.
It’s well understood that people who go into rock ‘n’ roll usually start…
Benefit Show For The Global Fund For Women @ Maxwell’s
HOBOKEN, NJ—Nelson Pla is a perennial figure in the local music scene, as a composer and performer with connections to countless local bands and even a few nationally recognized groups. Three years back, Nelson became involved with the San Francisco-based Global Fund for Women, an agency that directs its…
Interview with Glen Phillips from Toad The Wet Sprocket: In And Out Of The Mainstream
Modern rock. Alternative rock. Indie Rock. No band epitomizes those terms or is a better representative of the breakaway style of music that spanned the two decades that straddle the year 2000 than Toad The Wet Sprocket.
Starting out in the ‘80s as a high school garage band in…
Social Distortion: Hard Times And Nursery Rhymes
This newest album by the resurgent ‘80s “punktry” group Social Distortion comes in two versions, regular and deluxe, the former containing 11 and the latter 14 songs.
Times and styles change, and bands themselves evolve. Frontman Mike Ness has forged a solo career, and this album reflects his delving…
Mark Sinnis: The Night’s Last Tomorrow
The Night’s Last Tomorrow is the third CD released by the frontman for Cemetery-and-Western band, Ninth House, and it is rich with both new material and mature, acoustic reinterpretations of songs, often featuring brave and innovative instrumentation to accompany Mark’s chocolaty vocals. Some have appeared on Sinnis’ two prior solo…
