After stomping onto the scene in ‘91 with their crushing Pitchfork EP, Clutch has spent the past 17 years in a vicious touring and recording cycle, honing their sound to the slick, snarling beast of blues-infused stomp-rock it is today.

We sat down to talk to vocalist and lyrical maestro Neil Fallon about all things Clutch, including the band’s label philosophies, how they put a song together and their future plans, as well as some promising updates on side projects The Company Band and The Bakerton Group.

Neil Fallon: The music industry followed a model that they set up in the 1920s to rip off hillbillies and black artists. They never changed their model, they made their bed and now they’re lying in it.

I wasn’t going to write this review. I’ve been a Jay-Z fan for over a decade, and while that doesn’t necessarily make me a loyalist, there was certainly a divide between Nas and the Hova world that left me feeling a bit… unqualified. Besides, the controversy over the title was all we heard about the album for months. By default, it’s usually the death rattle for a record when anything but the music itself gets such advance hype.

But not this time.

I feel a hell of a lot worse about the collective rationale of our species. A time capsule DVD compiled by the California-based Planetary Society was attached to NASA’s Phoenix probe as part of its mission to explore the red planet’s arctic for signs of life and water. With a destination 70 million miles away, the DVD is the single most exclusive disc in the history of mankind. Eat your heart out, Axl.

The idea is to give future Martians a snapshot of how they’re viewed on Earth, because it would only make sense that aliens traveling millions of light years across the universe would make a pit-stop in an arctic crater on a dead planet with a sulfuric atmosphere to check out the DVD selection. Naturally, nobody thought to include a region-free DVD player with the probe, but I’m willing to bet that that won’t make much of a difference.

The limited edition Nine Inch Nails CD/DVD now in my hands may be brand new, but the music on it isn’t. We reviewed the album, entitled The Slip, when mastermind Trent Reznor first made it available as a free download in May- making a few headlines in the process, and reminding us once again that whether or not he knows where U.S.S. Music Industry is headed, or if it will even stay afloat, he is one of the new captains on board.

There’s no point in talking about music you’ve surely heard for yourself by now, but this release is noteworthy to me at least because it represents the first time I’ve bought a physical CD in a long time.

Here is something truly fresh and unique. Here is a sample of exactly the type of energy Antiquiet feeds off. I’ve discovered a design company based out of Portland. It took me awhile to figure out that they were a design company- at first glance they appear to be a construction company, which the design nerd in me finds fucking brilliant. It’s a great image, which perfectly complements their no-bullshit, straight-to-the-point design ethics. Draplin Design Company proprietor Aaron James Draplin is the star of this video clip, which made my day.

As long as it took me to figure out that Draplin is not a construction company, it took me even longer to figure out what the story was behind this video, left on the doorstep of the internet with little more than a nametag.