This week, specifically tomorrow, Feb. 9, comedian Wanda Sykes is coming to the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank. She is fucking hilarious. You should go see her.

I interviewed Wanda Sykes by telephone (it’s amazing how old fashioned that word seems; like I had to crank up the phone…

My wife and I were sitting on the couch this past Sunday afternoon, with not much going on—as we rarely are on weekends these days—and as a way to pass the time, she suggested we watch a half-hour cut of the film The Third Jihad she’d stumbled on…

Lo-fi British duo Blut make their home in fucked-up drone and doomed riffing, working hard to sound as inaccessible as possible at any given moment. This is completely on purpose. The band’s warped vision of psychedelic extremity feeds into an overall perspective that is disaffected and hinting at a…

When I was a little kid, I used to go with my mother to Caldor on Rt. 10 in Morris Plains. If you’re not familiar, places like Caldor and Bradlee’s were like Target but without the play at upper middle class aesthetic. They were dumpy, knew it, and didn’t pretend…

Clutch/Corrosion Of Conformity/Earthride

The Trocadero

December 31, 2011

PHILADELPHIA, PA—New Year’s Eve with Clutch, C.O.C. and Earthride—sometimes life just provides you with easy choices. I mean, really, there was no way in hell I was going to miss this show. My wife and I packed into the car early…

I went to church this week for the first time in a few years. Like a lot of born and bred Catholics, I don’t believe in God. And that’s not, “Oh, I believe in a higher power that I’m too chickenshit to call ‘god’ because intellectually I know Christianity is…

It was a shock when Trouble vocalist Eric Wagner split from the long-running and influential Chicago classic doom outfit. The band’s much-awaited album, Simple Mind Condition, had finally been released, and when Wagner announced he’d begun a new solo acoustic project called Blackfinger, heavy metal eyebrows across the world…

There are some men who will tell you flat-out as a blanket statement that women are not funny. I am not one of them. I think Wanda Sykes is one of the most hilarious people on the planet—every step on par with the likes of Chris Rock—and coming from me,…

It says something that, 30 years into their career, North Carolinian stalwarts Corrosion Of Conformity are just now releasing a self-titled record. Due out Feb. 28 on Candlelight, Corrosion Of Conformity is the first C.O.C. album in seven years and the first since 1985’s Animosity not to feature the…

   Well, I was going to write a big thing about how dumb 2011 was or all the time I wasted waiting for things around me to come together so I could, I don’t know, have a life or something, but screw it. 2011 blew donkey balls, and not much…