Confusingly Named Background Gloom Licks, 2003

RAPTURE, Songs for the Withering The Rapture that Williamsburgers don’t know are a heavy-hearted quintet of Helsinki codeine-metal fops who quote Emily Brontë and Sophocles on their lyric sheet and gorgeously balance light croons with heavy grumbles about cold years and hangings and maggots (“our only friends”) and “bad dreams, hollow sleep of dark rooms,…

G.G. Allin review, 1987

Snark, pure and simple (okay, paired with a pinch of one-upmanship I suppose), prodded by my annoyance of at an early example of the tiresome hipster schtick of pretending to like (or actually liking, who cares) music by a mentally ill person — in this case, a presumably dangerous and smelly one. In retrospect, I…

Neo-Prog Licks, 2003

NIGHTFIST, The Epic For a CD recorded for $600 and containing barely 26 minutes of music, this one sure seems long, though the title suggests that’s exactly how these five recent high school graduates from Menlo Park, California, want it. “Rabid fans of Yes, Queen, Dream Theater, Grateful Dead, and Metallica,” reportedly not at all…

Outsider Proto-Punk Reissue Licks, 2003

MICHAEL YONKERS BAND, Microminiature Love St. Paul, Minnesota, 1968. Techie-teen leader of Michael and the Mumbles tires of twanging surf ditties at prom and VFW crowds, so he saws down his Fender and slashes open his speakers and lets his ominous baritone vibrato’s pomped-up medieval-castle Procol Harum poetry fall into black holes of Link Wray-reverbed…

Monster Records Metal Reissue Licks, 2004

TRUTH AND JANEY, ERUPTS! In April 1976, an unpretentious numskull trio from some Iowa cowtown recorded this ballroom concert (longest endurance tests 9:05, 8:12, 7:21, 6:51), not issued on double vinyl till the early ’90s, and not on CD till now. To read their backstory, you need their 1,000-pressing 1976 studio LP, No Rest for the…

The Offspring profile, 1995

I dunno, maybe I gave the subjects of my only Spin cover story ever short shrift in my top 150 albums of 1994/’95 list. The singles on Smash are swell. But beyond that, I just get irritated. Maybe I’ll be able to hear pop-punk again after another decade or two, when I’m in my 70s…

False Metal Roundup, 1987

Three of the five albums focused on here made it into Stairway to Hell a few years later, which means plenty of the writing did, as well. But not all of it — including, I’m fairly certain, the battle of the bands between Mötley Crüe and Pussy Galore, and the too-soon Peter Tosh (R.I.P. 9/11/’87)…

Beastie Boys review, 1987

Not my most famous piece about the band. That came a couple of months later. Here, they hadn’t quite broke out yet. Pretty much the unbowdlerized original version of what became the Licensed to Ill entry in Stairway to Hell, if only because with alt-weekly reviews you don’t have to get permission to reprint multiple-lined…

Everclear review, 1997

One of my few section-fronting (and therefore longer) lead reviews in Spin. For some reason I don’t get, Generation Xers (or youngers) who write about music do not seem to remember Art Alexakis all that fondly. Perhaps they just weren’t old enough for him at the time. Spin, November 1997

Underground Metal roundup, 1987

A sort of early blueprint for Stairway to Hell (note the headline), where much of this piece wound up — though not nearly as much as I’ve long assumed. Only three albums (Celtic Frost, Voivod, Dick Destiny) overlap both book and article, plus one more band (Saint Vitus) represented by different albums in each. Plus…