The two principal members of Shearling, a new band formed after the demise of Sprain, recently shed a lot of light on their ambitious, hour-long, single-track debut album, Motherfucker, I am Both: “Amen” and “Hallelujah”… Read my recent FLOOD interview, the first one the band gave in support of their debut album, for more.
There’s a default word that society uses when it deems someone to be neither pretty nor rude: mediocre. Unlike the gnarly way that the badass villains in Fury Road employ the term as a cutting insult, in real life, the term is—in the common parlance of our times boring. So, while the guys in the band at issue in this feature story might not exactly make hearts go a-twitter when they saunter down sidewalks or even grace stages at music venues, they seemed far more polite than rude when The Bad Penny caught up with them a month ago. “Mediocre” was the one of the last words we’d reach for to describe them.
A far better descriptor for Pretty Rude would be “ballsy.” Brooklynites James Palko and Matt Cook connected less than a year ago to form Pretty Rude, signed with revered, 30-year-old punk label SideOneDummy Records in February. Just a few days later, they introduced themselves and showed their sweet side by presenting their first release—a self-titled EP—on Valentine’s Day. A pretty rude gesture that most certainly was not.
Continue readingBecause Transcending Obscurity founder Kunal Choksi’s moral values include humility along with nurturing strays back to health, few are aware of his superhuman efforts helping animals concurrent with running his Mumbai-based record label. Read my profile on one of the most standup dudes in underground music via New Noise.
New York bedroom pop trio Triathalon spent two years writing, demoing, recording and mixing the record in bedrooms, studios and houses, as if they were on a scavenger’s hunt. Read my New Noise profile on the band.
“I wrestle with some things that have got worse in my life, or deeper (into my psyche,) and I wanted to get into the weeds of those ideas and express them.” Get deep with English hard rock squadron Wytch Hazel in my profile on the band for New Noise.
As a fresh-cheeked posse with pedigree, musical talent, creativity and sensitivity in tow, anyone would be a fool not to bet on Lifeguard, Matador Records’ newest hope. They don’t seem to know it, but riveting success appears to be their destiny. Read my Treble feature on the band for confirmation that you should take this post-rock project to the bank.
Boldly going where precious few artists—Brainiac, Racebannon, HORSE the Band—have dared go before, screamo brain-scramblers For Your Health prove that ingesting berserk art-noise does a body good. Except for the occasional bout of heartburn, that is. Vocalist Hayden Rodriguez gets candid about the trials and tribulations that preceded the screamo band’s newly released debut for 3DOT, This Bitter Garden. Read the whole shebang via FLOOD.
Feast your eyes and ears on brand-new post-groove metal newcomers Noumenia in their first-ever interview, which I recently conducted with the entire band after its signing to Eclipse Records. The story is featured in the July issue of Music Connection and is also available online here.
Malevolence are a rare metal quintet that have four of its five founding members still in the group. Thanks to their deep friendships with one another, the band born in Sheffield, United Kingdom, have the gift of an underlying groundwork of trust that eludes the majority of bands, regardless of genre. Read my cover story on Malevolence in the latest issue of New Noise, or check out the feature online here.
Birth (Defects) vocalist Sean Gray, guitarist Rob Savillo and electronics handler Joey Generic give New Noise a rather riotous, hourlong conversation as the Baltimore band’s career is now over. Read my feature on the reigning crust punk in the latest edition of New Noise magazine; or here, if you wanna be all, like, “Man, I ain’t even heard of twenty … what did you call them, homie, “Days”?
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