PHOENIX, AZ | Shinedown and the Revolutions tour stopped at Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre alongside Papa Roach for a sold out crowd in Phoenix, Arizona. The group brought their unique mix of rock, grunge, and pop-metal to the 23rd stop on this 2023 fall tour.

The Florida natives began their set with “Diamond Eyes,” a tune from their 2008 album The Sound of Madness. Accompanied by pyrotechnics, the band brought the heat literally and figuratively. The band followed the opener with “Dead Don’t Die” and “I’ll Follow You.

Coming onto the scene in 2001, the band has shown they have a healthier endurance than just about anyone still touring and releasing music into the early 2020s. Playing songs from their entire career, a band like this is what brings generations together. One could possibly surmise the average age of the audience, but you can be sure everyone was on their feet the entire time.

The revolutions tour and the 17 song setlist brings everyone on a two decade journey. The band plays as if it’s their last show, and plays for their only boss—all while fire and lights go wild. The show is an absolute blast from start to finish.

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Pull Down The Shades – GARAGE Fanzine 1984-86 collects all six issues of New Zealander Richard Langston’s homemade publication, an endeavor that focused on his country’s music scene of the era, and specifically the bands commonly associated with the Flying Nun and Xpressway labels. The depth of the in-the-moment coverage by Langston and his numerous contributors and the insightful and moving contemporary essays and interviews that follow the six issues illuminates how the scene took shape but also documents how the fanzine was an instigator of progress as it helped to get the word out beyond Kiwi shores. It’s an indispensable tome; a second printing of 500 copies is out now from HoZac Books.

The Kiwi scene Pull Down The Shades documents is one of the richest geographical uprisings in 20th century pop-rock music, an underground movement that resonated across the globe. Back in those days, it took a while for word to get around, and fanzines were crucial, not just to spread the info to other regions, but to solidify the scene it covered, getting the word out to locals and new folks in town.

Bluntly, the 1980s Flying Nun scene could not be contained. By the end of the decade, its biggest bands were well-known entities in the international college rock/ alternative/ indie scheme of things, with the two most pop savvy, The Chills and The Verlaines, eventually landing record deals with Warner Bros. through subsidiary Slash Records.

But what made this particular scene special wasn’t its ability to flirt with mainstream success. In fact, it was just the opposite, as the essence of the ’80s Flying Nun experience was that it was just too good for bland broad appeal. Pull Down The Shades accentuates this reality in a variety of ways. Foremost is the fundamental DIY nature of the zine reproductions, which effectively mirror how these bands were creating for the sheer pleasure of it rather than calculating their career moves.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Blessed with a formidable front woman in Brett Anderson, a guitar heroine in Allison Robertson, and a pummeling rhythm section in bassist Maya Ford and drummer Torry Castellano, The Donnas were one of the greatest pop/punk bands of the ‘90s and early 2000s.

1999’s Get Skintight was The Donnas’ third album in three years, but, with such bangers as “I Didn’t Like You Anyway,” “You Don’t Wanna Call,” and “Hyperactive,” the girls show no sign of songwriting fatigue. Production by Steve and Jeff McDonald of Redd Kross adds a little bite to the songs, but they’re already showing their teeth—the wannabe boyfriend putdowns are as ferocious (“A boston baked bean is the size of your head/I heard you even wet your bed”) as they are funny, and the libidos are, um, lively.

There’s also a Mötley Crüe cover (“Too Fast for Love”), but The Donnas’ songs are better. Remastered for vinyl by Mike Milchner at Sonic Vision, and reissued complete with a 4-page insert featuring the original insert plus band commentary. Purple with pink swirl vinyl!

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Let’s raise a drink to Twink—he’s a goddamn psychedelic rock hero. Twink (given name John Charles Edward Alder, adopted name as of 2006 Mohammed Abdullah) has pristine acid rock bona fides—he was the drummer for the Pretty Things when they released their seminal 1968 concept LP S.F. Sorrow, before moving on to loveable anarchists the Pink Fairies.

And during the interim between bands he released his first solo LP, 1970’s Think Pink, with a cast of lysergic loons that included defrocked Deviants frontman Mich Farren (who produced) and ex-Tyrannosaurus Rex vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Steve Peregrin Took, both of whom would go on with Twink to form the prototype of the Pink Fairies. Also on board was Canadian sessions musician Paul Rudolph, who before he returned to his true love of cycling was perhaps the most unhinged (and unheralded) guitarist on the English psychedelic underground scene.

Think Pink is very much a creature of its times, but it’s stood up over the years. Whimsical and eccentric in the Grand English Manner, albeit quite dark in some places, its songs vary from sound-effects heavy freakscapes to off-the-cuff goofs to a few of the best—if seldom heard—acid rock songs of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. In short it’s a dog’s breakfast of an album that keeps its ambitions low—this is art for art’s sake stuff, making few concessions to commercial accessibility, which isn’t to say that one or two of these songs wouldn’t have sounded too out of place on the old wireless.

The LP opens with the inadvertently hilarious “The Coming of the One,” a madcap collection of discordant sounds that include sitar, pixie horn, and lots of deranged voices over which Twink turns Nostradamus and gives us the lowdown on life in the year 1999—and exactly seven months.

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LEDYARD, CT | Just one day after the release of her new album Along The Way, Colbie Caillat made a very special visit to the Cedar Showroom of Foxwoods, performing before a packed theater of some of her most devoted fans. “Colbie was so humble and sweet,” said Kristen Palazzo Salvato, of Coventry RI. “She just has such a cool laid-back vibe about her. We could not have asked for a better show. Truly amazing.”

Caillat kicked off the night with fan favorites right off the bat—”Fallin’ for You;” “Realize;” “I Never Told You;” “Lucky” — many off of her early albums. “You know what’s so interesting about songwriting is that I wrote these songs—a lot of them like 15, 16 years ago or even longer—and I can find new meaning with them today in what I’m experiencing in life and who I’m hanging out with. And it’s really cool to get to sing these lyrics and just have new feeling and new meaning with them.”

Caillat added that a rewarding aspect of her career is the connection fans continue to have with her music. “They feel like they’re not alone in what they’re going through, whether they’re falling in love or going through a loss or just living life. And I know music does that for me. And then when I get to write. It’s very therapeutic. And then when I hear that my songs are helping other people with what they’re going through in life, I’m like, ‘you too!’”

Throughout the night, Caillat reminisced and engaged the audience with a glimpse into the history behind her music. As much as she is a gifted artist, she is equally a gifted and genuine storyteller. She recalled her experience working with Jason Mraz on her their duet “Lucky.”

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Glam never dies. It predated David Bowie, Marc Bolan, and the New York Dolls, and its tradition has been carried on by the likes of Destroyer and, most importantly, Lady Gaga. But during the eighties Glam became associated with metal bands whose only claim to genre lay in the fact they wore make-up. The likes of Poison, Ratt, and Skid Row all have their attraction, but Glam they most definitely they ain’t.

England’s The Darkness are the real thing. They have musical similarities to eighties Glam metal, but they understand that Glam is an attitude, a pose, a way of looking at life. Fey, androgynous, witty, artificial, decidedly un-macho and essentially frivolous, glitter rockers adhere to that most famous of dandies Oscar Wilde’s famous credo, “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” And on their 2003 debut Permission to Land—which has been reissued for its 20th anniversary in various configurations—The Darkness stand up for that greatest of human endeavors—going pink flamingo flamboyant and having an ostrich feather lark while doing it. The Darkness’s name may well be an inside joke, because there’s absolutely nothing dark about them.

The Darkness stand apart from the pack on the quality of their music alone, but what really makes them one of Glam’s shinier gifts to the glamkind is lead vocalist and guitarist Justin Hawkins’ voice, which is so campy and outrageous he makes Freddy Mercury sound like Hoyt Axton. I invite you to listen to the way he goes for the high notes, stutters and positively warbles his way through the band’s big one, “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” Hawkins goes for baroque every time he opens his mouth.

There isn’t a single weak track on Permission to Land, and some of the band’s influences may surprise you. Opening track “Black Shuck” is AC/DC in five-inch stacked heels. On “Get Your Hands Off My Woman” The Darkness plays a primal riff while Hawkins does a bit of yodeling.”Growing on Me” is a mid-tempo number with an eighties glam metal feel and a chorus that could be by Warrant.

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Decades before bands like the Boredoms and Melt Banana put the Land of the Rising Sun on the noise rock map, another Japanese band was making discordant sounds—Les Rallizes Dénudés.

The racket-inclined psych-rock/folk band’s story—which began in 1967 at Kyoto’s Doshisha University—reads like a good novel. You get clamorous feedback of epic proportions. Radical politics and a connection to a prominent terrorist group. A spotty recording history—they never released a proper album despite the fact they were around for years, but left behind only a series of shoddily recorded live and abortive studio recordings. A reclusive and possibly paranoid lead singer. Oh, and to top it all off, an airplane hijacking by a former member turned revolutionary. Plane crashes are a staple of rock mythology, but a plane hijacking? Why not throw in demonic possession and a few zombies into the mix?

Les Rallizes Dénudés has been on the public radar recently due to the 2023 release of CITTA’ ’93, a polished-up and carefully remastered recording of the band’s final show—after a very long hiatus—at Tokyo’s Club Citta in 1993. Some of their other official releases—there are bootlegs galore circulating out there—have been remastered as well. One is 2022’s The OZ Tapes, which was remastered from the original tapes, discovered after the 2019 death of frontman Takashi Mizutani. You get howling guitar, more howling guitar, a song or two reminiscent of the Velvet Underground at their most melodic mellow and, surprisingly, some laid-back psych-folk that would do the Grateful Dead proud.

But first, a quick glance at the band’s tumultuous early days. They started the band as students, and took some tenuous steps towards recording in a proper studio before deciding to focus exclusively on playing live. While they played at protests—including a show at a student-occupied (as in they took the fucker over) auditorium—only one of the group, founding member and bassist Moriaki Wakabayashi, took the leap into violent revolutionary activity, joining the Yodogō Group of the radical New Left Japan Communist League’s “Red Army Faction.”

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Long Island, NY | PRONG Celebrates ‘State Of Emergency’ Album Release With Performance At Long Island Record Store: PRONG celebrated the release of its thirteenth studio album, “State Of Emergency”, last Friday (October 6) by playing a special set Record Stop in Patchogue, New York. Earlier today (Tuesday, October 10), PRONG shared photos of the performance on Instagram and included the following message: “THANK YOU! “Big shoutout to every that showed up at Record Stop last Friday and to every single one of you that has grabbed a copy of ‘State of Emergency’ or have listened via the different streaming platforms! “‘State of Emergency’ reached #5 in Amazon Metal Best Sellers in the US and in Germany over the weekend! “‘State of Emergency’ out now – Listen everywhere!”

Santa Monica, CA | A small coffee is the gateway to a lifetime of music at Endless Noise: It would take a lifetime to listen to all 10,000 vinyl albums available at Santa Monica’s Endless Noise but fortunately for audiophiles, the production studio also houses a hidden coffee shop to keep the mind spinning as fast as the records. For almost 30 years, Endless Noise studios has worked with varying artists, composers, companies, films, and more. Their work is wide-reaching and nuanced, while maintaining a very personal, community feel. During those decades, owner Jeff Elmassian amassed his massive record collection and always imagined a time where he would turn his hobby into a business but it wasn’t until he opened the collection to the clients of the production company and paired the experience with a strong Turkish coffee that co-Creative Director Dave Chapman said the time was right to expand Endless Noise into a fully functional vinyl record store and coffee shop. The combination recording studio/record store/cafe now provides an auditory oasis on the city’s southeast edge.

Peoria, IL | Indie record store gets a new lease on life in a Forgottonia farm shed: Most people wouldn’t expect to find a record store on a rural farm off of a gravel road in Fulton County. That’s why you may be surprised when there’s a sign for a local business called Shandi’s Music and More. Bob Long has owned and operated Shandi’s since its founding in 1999. The store used to be located in the nearby town of Canton, but had to close in 2016. After a hiatus, Long reopened Shandi’s this past August, with the store now located in a shed on his farm. “It was a building that was on the farm, and we needed a place to open, and so we just decided to just go ahead and do it here,” Long said. Long chose to reopen Shandi’s in the new location due to online demand from regular customers. “People asked all the time, ‘hey is the store gonna reopen? We want some music,’” Long said, illustrating how his customers were willing to drive from anywhere to shop at the store.

Dundee, UK | Boxes of vinyl from legendary Dundee record shop Groucho’s fetch £17k+ at auction: Some of the displays were bought by those hoping to convert the Nethergate site into a music-themed bar. Boxes of vinyl records from legendary Dundee record shop Groucho’s have fetched more than £17,000 at auction. A total of 460 lots made up of remaining stock from the shop went under the hammer with Curr and Dewar on Tuesday. Lots included hundreds of boxes full of records, shop displays, memorabilia, electrical items, phonographs and stereos. Lasting more than three hours, the auction attracted more than 650 dealers, collectors and bargain hunters alike online and in person. Auctioneer Steven Dewar said: “Auctions like this one are always exciting because no two lots are the same. “There were lots of unique items in the Groucho’s sale. “It’s a real feather in the cap for us to be asked and it was a privilege to be the auctioneer.”

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