Them Crooked Vultures‘ eponymous debut arrives November 17, after a summer of rampant speculation and mind-blowing live performances. Self-sustained on arbitrary cool, the intergenerational Rock-god project has birthed a planet of popped-collar reptilian kings with wild eyes, razor teeth and twitching, rampant hard-ons. For once, an album arrives that laughs in the face of the hype avalanche and crushes expectation. Full Article »

It Might Get Loud, director Davis Guggenheim’s convergence and technique dissection of three iconic guitar virtuosos from different generations – Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, The Edge of U2 and Jack White of The White Stripes, The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather – is a music film unlike any you’ve seen, and an absolute mandate for any musician or music fan who’s been touched by the sounds of any of the three men involved. Full Article »

The rumors are true – Josh Homme, Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones are currently holed up in a Los Angeles recording studio, working on an album that’s been the biggest secret in rock for what seems like years now. Full Article »

It Might Get Loud is a Rock N’ Roll documentary, featuring Jack White, Jimmy Page, and The Edge. It’s not a performance documentary. It’s not a biopic. It’s about the relationship between three generations’ leading guitar virtuosos, and their relationships with their instruments. Full Article »

As we head into Summer, down at the record store that exists only as an abstract these days, the proverbial new release wall is loaded end to end. We’ve been going through all of it, and we’ve got tons of reviews coming over the next week or two. But one album that stood out right from the start is White Lies For Dark Times, the newest from Ben Harper, with his new band Relentless7. Full Article »

In the first installment of our three-part Road Journals interview with Cold War Kids frontman Nathan Willett, the vocalist wrote from a smoky dressing room in Berlin to share his thoughts on the state of decline in the music industry, spirituality and the simple pleasures that make a musician’s vagabond life worth living.

Part two of our interview arrives from Munich, the next stop on the band’s European tour in support of their new album, Loyalty To Loyalty. This time around, Nathan shares his thoughts on author David Foster Wallace, the pitfalls of a musician re-recording their own songs and the emerging culture of isolation in America. Full Article »

I heard Rose Hill Drive for the first time just a few weeks ago. I remember getting an email from my brother, who’d just come back from a taping of Conan O’Brien’s show in New York and was amped as all hell about the musical guest. “Sick vocals, sick bass, nasty lead guitar and solid fucking drums! They look like the Hanson brothers all grown up,” he told me. “Like the White Stripes on steroids.”Understanding fully that Jack White on steroids would pretty much cause the universe to collapse in on itself, I took this news for the slight exaggeration it had to be. But my interest was piqued. I caught ‘em on Conan later that night, and after seeing them tear the shit out of their new single Sneak Out, I understood what my brother was so excited about. I knew we had to talk to these guys.

We got tracked down drummer Nathan Barnes to get a bearing on what the band’s up to, where they’ve learned from the legends and what it means to be a band breaking into a dying industry. Full Article »