I had scoured my car for anything remotely contraband. Ian MacKaye himself would have been proud of my Scion xB’s sobriety. And yet I still felt tongue-tied when the Border Patrol officer had me roll down my window at the checkpoint just east of El Paso.

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Deschryver’s insistent melee of beats gave the songs a feeling of urgency right out of the gate, as though they’d taken the crescendo at the end of a song by some lame Coldplay-type band and started there, building whole songs around something that felt explosive, hypnotic, and yet grimly final, like watching a tragedy played out over and over again on CNN as you stare, helpless.

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To enter our contest see the movie and Q&A absolutely free, simply leave the name of your favorite Jay Reatard song in the comments below–our crack team of judges will pick one selection at random and issue that person two free passes. We will be judging on style and poise, so descriptions of your favorite song, links, videos, etc, will definitely help your case!

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Goodbye to Whitney Houston, who died today at age 48. For kids like me who were in elementary school when Whitney Houston got big, she wasn’t so much a singer as a touch point for the times. She was everywhere. She had a million great videos, with more youthful smiles and a broader color palette [...]

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Yesterday  in Santa Ana, I relived a bit of my youth at the homeland-security-threatening Cacophony Society documentary extravaganza that included a preview screening of Jon Alloway’s Cacophony Society documentary Into the Zone: the Story of the Cacophony Society followed by the grand opening of the Cacophony Society Zone Show “art” retrospective at Santa Ana’s Grand [...]

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Somehow the Aggrolites are of that Warped world, and yet they have successfully fought its worst urges and drained all the suck out, leaving behind a “dirty reggae” sound that is highly pure, largely instrumental, organ-driven, and at times even beautiful. Listening to this album is like watching the female skinheads of This Is England walking down the street in their braces and boots.

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Every rainbow owes its existence to a rain cloud, and that dark space between the two is filled by Corridor’s music. As Corridor, Michael Quinn has recently released his second album, Real Late, with Manimal Vinyl. It’s heavy, intense stuff that wields a fine metal edge to reveal something beautiful. We sat him on the couch between L.A. RECORD’s Dan Collins and Daiana Feuer.

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I pride myself on being able to capture the sound of music in words, but there really is no way to convey what came out of that man’s throat and into our hearts Friday night. The closest I can get is to say that he sounded effortless and full of love, like butter melting slowly over Mom’s pancakes. He sounded awake and alert, classy, not cluttered in Rastafarian claptrap but “transcendent” in as close to a literal meaning as an atheist like me can believe in.

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In case you’re wondering, Jade solo is the same Jade you think you know, just as smiley and happy from two feet away as in every photo of her in Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros on a festival stage you’ve ever seen. As she tuned and tried to adjust to the crappy sound system by leaving her elevated stool and sitting cross-legged on the low stage, even her eyes smiled, and her eyebrows too. And if I’d had a magnifying glass, I would suspect that her dimples are smile-shaped.

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Shannon and the Clams are NOT a girl group: they glean insights from Danzig as well as from Patsy Cline, and they sneak messages about loving dogs and blinding Prince Charming into songs inspired by the soundtrack to Indiana Jones. They speak to us now from the road as electronic children’s records about botanical delights blast from the van’s speakers, somewhere between god-knows-where and Vegas. This interview by Dan Collins.

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