It’s the difference between hippies, taking massive bong hits, and revolutionary freaks snorting the same prepared cannabinoid snuff the Zulu used to knock the shit out of the British.

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Perhaps YOU, fair reader, need encouragement to look past the U.K. gossip rags and Houghton’s Gaga-esque costumery, and really engage with this album’s songs. Do it!

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No iMac here—this lo-fi assemblage of beats around looped vocal clips feels put together with twine, and reminds me of one of the best eras of hip-hop, when groups like EPMD really got out the scratchy vinyl and put together smart, evocative new songs that respected their source material while standing on its shoulders to achieve something utterly new. Except, you know, EPMD had rappers, and here there are none, except maybe the loops of Ned Flanders saying “Son of a gun-diddley-un!”

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Let me spell it out as clearly as I can: STOP HERO-FUCKING ROGER WATERS’ RICKENBACKER 4001S. If you must steal, at least copy some obscure riff from the Orange Bicycle or Aphrodite’s Child or the third West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band album; then only me and DJ Nobody would know you’re biting people’s songs.

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… for some reason she’s let her solo career be dictated by her love of cabaret and torch songs. That made a bit of sense in the mid-noughties during the reign of cabarets, Club Bricktops, and her own Mata Hari nights at Tangier, but it didn’t work at all when opening for her buddies in bands like Celebrity Skin, where her gentle ballad-pop simply got drowned out by its lack of sheer might. With this album, she hasn’t lost the narrative lyrics or the chord changes, but now her voice doesn’t stand alone in a field of schmaltz—she’s finally brave enough to let her lovely voice (it really sounds better than ever) compete with the big guns of bass, guitar and drums.

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I loved this song when it came out as an album track on their debut record in 2008. Now Eddie Chacon and his collaborator (and wife) Sissy Sainte-Marie have re-released the tune as a single, which they’re promoting via a new bad-assed video:

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At this point the rain was light but the wind was heavy, and I saw Liam Philpot of Jimmy Cliff’s band nearly run for cover as the giant dangly trusses of lights and cables above him wiggled violently in the wind. Whoever the DJ was, he had a smirky sense of humor, as he played “Riders on the Storm” throughout setup.

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THE ABIGAILS, BLUE SKIES FOR BLACK HEARTS, L.A. DRUGZ, AND HONEYMOON SCREAMS ON SUNDAY APR. 8TH AT THE BLUE STAR, 2200 EAST 15TH STREET, LOS ANGELES. 8:00PM/ FREE/ 21+

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Our friend Jane was like a waitress, and when she’d fuck up at work, she’d be like, “Oh, sorry, I was in a K-hole!” And then, we were like, that’s really funny, because no one even talks about K-Holes! That’s like a… gone term. Does anyone even do K? And then our friends asked us to be a one-off month band, and they were like, “Just be something stupid!” And we were like, “We’ll be the fucking K-Holes! That’s really stupid.” And we did it, and then everybody liked it, and they asked if we wanted to play again, and we were like, “Okay …”

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Buzzcocks founder Pete Shelley has always surprised his public. Just think of the overt craziness of “Orgasm Addict,” or the hinted gay innuendoes of “Ever Fallen in Love (with Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)” that exploded later into righteously electronic gay anthems such as the BBC-banned “Homosapien.” Yet even I was floored by the revelations on this Drag City box set, which contains the entire catalog of his short-lived, spaced-out noise, late 70s label Groovy Records—even the name hints at a secret life behind the backs of his punk brethren.

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