Blog: Rock Star Journalist

Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott 's new book from I.B. Tauris , TV Horror: Investigating the Darker Side of the Small Screen , is an excellent, scholarly look at how the horror genre is portrayed on television. The authors look both to Stephen King's oft-quoted opinion that television limits the terror that can be portrayed, as well as examining the possibilities offered by the small screen. It's strange, though - the book mentions the likes of the X-Files , Alfred Hitchcock Presents , the Twilight Zone , and Buffy the [...]

Thanks to gum surgery earlier this week, its attendant expenditures, and the fact that the records I ordered have yet to show up, the planned-out setlist I'd made for the new podcast pretty much had to be set aside. It hurts to talk, as well as to listen to me laterally lisp my way through most words, so hopping on the mic wasn't an option this week. That being said, I've signed up to Soundcloud and put together a pretty boss tracklisting from some new records, as well as unreleased shiz and so on. Soundcloud's rapidly becoming as [...]

• theNuthouse - Sunglasses After Dark 2013.02.15

Despite a toddler running around, Matt Beat has finished his trilogy, The Presidents of the United States of America , as performed by Electric Needle Room . This is the third volume of songs about every president of the United States - except for Obama, however. Beat says he's "waiting to write the song about him until after his term." The final collection will see release on the same day as the previous two volumes: on Presidents Day, Monday, February 18. The release show will be at One More Cup Coffeehouse [...]

My wife bought me a copy of So Cow 's Meaningless Friendly when she saw them open for Ted Leo and the Pharmacists a few years back. I listened to it, and enjoyed it (most releases on Tic Tac Totally are pretty dandy). However, I didn't get a chance to see them until I went to CMJ back in October of last year. Dan from Inflated Records hooked me up with a copy of the split between the two Dublin acts, and I've been hoping that this year's South By Southwest music festival would bring [...]

Another Friday night, another show at the Replay. It seems the folks booking bands for the bar understand that people will go out on a weekend night to drink, no matter what, especially in a college town. Considering they can go most anywhere, it's worth throwing a good show together to drag in a few extra folks. Friday's show was a particularly Kansas City affair - the wife and I saw few people we recognized, and Soft Reeds is a popular enough act these days to pull the crowd west down I-70 to see them. They've [...]

Swamp Cabbage Records (who put out that pretty amazing Cancer Is A Punk compilation a couple years back) are releasing the next bit of music from Rock Star Journalist faves the New Rochelles . It's entitled Smile of the Tiger , and it's a split with the DeeCracks from Austria. 300 are pressed, with 100 on orange, and 200 on black. It comes with a digital download and ships early February. It officially came out yesterday, and you can order it now from the Swamp Cabbage store [...]

Canada's Hellshovel are described by their label, Slovenly Records , as "bumpkin punks," and their most recent album, Hated By The Sun , as "the sound of Johnny Cash drowning in a pool of cough syrup." These are apt descriptions, and when you factor in their work with Greece's Acid Baby Jesus on the Voyager 8 10-inch last year, there's a lot of drug references being thrown around. It's not inaccurate - I've never heard a band who more accurately represented being fucked up through music. Hellshovel and Acid Baby [...]

The new album from the Bronx keeps getting hailed as the band "returning to form" or some such nonsense after two albums as Mariachi el Bronx . Poppycock, I say. While definitely heavier than the mariachi albums, The Bronx IV isn't the furious, rambunctious tones of the band's earlier albums. At one point, singer Matt Caughthran's vocals sounded like he was shredding his vocal chords with each and every song. The desperate howls of "Bats!", "History's Stranglers" or "They Will Kill Us All (Without Mercy)" are not to be found on IV [...]

Lawrence's power-pop quartet the Dead Girls released their latest LP, Fade In/Fade Out on Friday, and to celebrate, they played an album release party at the Replay Lounge. The group played the entirety of the new album, top to bottom, and it sounded fucking incredible. As the Dead Girls have gone along, they've gone from being a Cheap Trick-inspired group of guys to really covering the gamut of rock 'n' roll's poppier side. They've always been a bunch to embrace melody, but this new batch of tunes really takes [...]

St. Joseph's Radkey came to the Eighth Street Taproom in Lawrence last night, and a small group of hardy rock fans braved bitterly cold temperatures to catch the trio of young brothers in the bar's basement. The boys were shooting a music video for "Is He All Right?", meaning the Taproom's concert nook was lit better than I've ever seen it. In addition to some pro cameras on hand, audience members were encouraged to shoot with camera, phones, or whatever they had. I was really, really hoping to see a Super 8, but no such luck. [...]

Charlotte, North Carolina's Late Bloomer have crafted one of those albums that sneaks up on you and steals away unexpectedly. I was listening to it at work today, and when it ended, I immediately thought, "Wait, what? No ... that's not enough." This trio does what it seems like every band I've enjoyed most in the past year does - digging into the not-so-distant past of the early '90s and melding the disparate pop and rock influences into something new. If you'd mentioned to me in my early teens that someday, [...]

Nothing makes me happier than music, most days. Really, the only thing that's better than music is free music, and that's what we have here. Michigan's Tiger! Tiger! somehow ended up with a bunch of Bandcamp downloads, and decided to bestow them on fans or curious lookie-loos such as myself. So, now through February 22, you can hit their Bandcamp page and download anything you like, free of charge. Bonus: if you head over to the Tiger! Tiger! Facebook page [...]

If a book consists mainly of quotes from other books, documentaries, articles, and other source, and contains minimal-to-no new interviews, revelations, or the like, it's essentially a research paper or graduate thesis stretched out with photos and illustrations. Such is the case with Mick O'Shea 's chronicle of the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy In the U.K." tour in the wake of their appearance on Bill Grundy's talk show. While a complete chronicle of the tour has never been so thoroughly presented, the documents from which O'Shea draws are newspaper articles from the time, and books written by all [...]

This past Friday, January 25, Lawrence Liquor Buddies played their third show ever. They've been a band for almost a year now, but as their name implies, this is more about fun and friends than fame and fortune. That being said, this is a band that plays pure rock 'n' roll. My buddy Rich has frequently opined that bands with critics in them tend to be irritating as hell (Yo La Tengo, the Patti Smith Group, et al), but frontman Steve Wilson's voice and the band's instruments were the only things with reverberations at the Replay early Friday [...]

Formerly Lawrencian (now San Francsican) indie pop trio Mammoth Life debut the music video for their new single, "Being Young," today. It's a fun bit of stop-motion animation, which manages to capture the whimsy of a bunch of Kansas kids living by the bay. The single is also available for free download, and you can find that below. "Being Young" by Mammoth Life

So, I took last week off because ... well, tomorrow marks the start of the spring semester, and my job is about to become far more busy than it's been in about a month and a half. Thus, I decided a week where all I had to do was concentrate on work and feeding the family would be more expeditious in terms of my mental health. That being said, I realized I had an evening free last night. With the wife gone, and one of the kids back to school, and it only being me and the youngest [...]

• Sunglasses After Dark - #97 - Where've You Been?

Young Skin features members of The Ergs!, Lemuria, Hunchback, Failures’ Union, Black Wine, Full of Fancy, For Science, et al, performing under pseudonyms, and rocking some garage-y tunes. They officially released The Sticky Pages E.P. on Paper + Plastick back in October. While that means this isn't exactly a timely article, this recently-unearthed interview has some great answers from the band's Liz Unfair , so we had to run it. Also, the EP is super-dandy, and it got lost in the shuffle when we were making our best of 2012 list. We hope this [...]

Pittsburgh punk trio Run, Forever recently released their second LP, Settling , via Tiny Engines . It's been over a year since the band last released any new music, and they're celebrating the new album by setting out on a tour with labelmates State Lines. The tour hits Kansas City's Art Closet Studios for a show with Emo Side Project on Sunday, January 13. Singer and guitarist Anthony Heubel spoke with us via e-mail about the new record, touring, and cats. Run, Forever's sound swings back [...]

Starting Thursday, January 10, children's show Yo Gabba Gabba will head out on the road with a new live show, entitled "Get the Sillies Out!" As if a show created by members of the Aquabats and featuring Biz Markie wasn't amazing enough, Asian Man Records label honcho and all-around cool guy Mike Park will be the Super Music Friend for the entirety of the tour. Mr. Park was cool enough to take time out of his rather busy schedule to talk to us. You're [...]

Last week, Viking Press released the hardcover edition of Clinton Heylin 's E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band . I read it this weekend. Some books I review are a joy, others a struggle. This one has moments of insight surrounded by pages of tedium. There are more ellipses in Heylin's book than most modern poetry anthologies, due in no small part to the author's use of quotes from interviews and transcriptions of Springsteen's live show banter. It demonstrates a sense of verisimilitude, getting the feel [...]