Search Results for: slow joy

Just when some old-school Metallica fans were ready to write the band off for crafting St. Anger – which prominently features a snare drum that sounds like a screwdriver hitting a trashcan – and for playing snippets of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and Lenny Kravitz’s “Are you Gonna Go My Way” at the VMAs, the band has redeemed itself. OK, they were doing fine before the VMAs. Few who attended Metallica’s Summer Sanitarium concerts walked away disappointed. The tour featured the band in peak form, bashing out its oldest and heaviest songs. However, a show on Friday for fan club… Read more »

Ticket sales are down, and big tours are scaling back to smaller venues. It looks to be a long, hot summer for the touring industry. On the cusp of the industry’s peak period, a number of high-profile tours and festivals have already hit snags, among them highly touted outings from Mariah Carey, the Field Day Music Festival, Lollapalooza, and Beck and Dashboard Confessional. Faced with a crowded tour market combined with high ticket prices, permit hassles, a sluggish economy and poor buzz, these tours and a handful of others have either had to scale back the size of the venues… Read more »

Pearl Jam is walking the long road…away from their longtime label. The grunge-rock survivors have served notice that they’re exiting the Sony-owned Epic Records after fulfilling the terms of its contract. The Seattle quintet quietly announced the split in the Q&A section of its Sony-run Rumour Pit Website. Sandwiched between questions about where the band is playing concerts and whether it will ever play the controversial anti-White House song “Bu$hleaguer” (answer: “Ya never know…”) is the query: “Have Pearl Jam left their record company yet?” The answer is simply “yes.” Pearl Jam has been in the Epic fold since the… Read more »

Dashboard Confessional and Jack Johnson played acoustic, and Beck and Coldplay celebrated Christmas, but otherwise KROQ-FM’s annual Almost Acoustic Christmas was a two-day, 20-act festival all about rocking. And the sold-out event was certainly crammed with rock and roll moments, particularly the announced live debut of Audioslave (they played a secret club show the night before), and an amusing rendition of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” orchestrated by Beck and the Flaming Lips and featuring Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba, Johnson and a horribly off-key Juliette Lewis. (Click here for photos from the show.) Audioslave were the talk… Read more »

There’s a line in the CKY song “Escape From Hellview” that goes, “I’m on the loose with my neck in the noose/ But hey, I enjoy the intense.” So when they picked up cameras to shoot a video for the tune, they decided it would be cool to hang guitarist Chad Ginsburg from a tree. It almost became the last stunt Ginsburg would ever pull. Since the grass-roots band self-financed the shoot on a meager budget, the only stunt coordinator they could afford turned out to be unqualified. The harness he tied around Ginsburg wasn’t secure enough, and the guitarist… Read more »

Just because New Found Glory are getting love from the “TRL” crowd doesn’t mean they’re changing their ways or cleaning up their act. Sure, the band’s next video is for the song “Head on Collision,” one of the slower, more melodic tracks from their latest album, Sticks & Stones. But the clip, directed by the Malloys, will reveal a previously unseen twisted side of the group thanks to the help of schlock horror production company Troma Films, which provided the makeup and special effects for the video. “Me and our singer Jordan are really big fans of ‘The Toxic Avenger’… Read more »

Acknowledging that online piracy is forcing dramatic changes in the music industry, the world’stwo largest record companies are poised to make it easy and cheap for fans to buy-rather than steal-songs off the Internet. The moves by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment accelerate the industry’s transition to an era in which music is distributed electronically. Other major labels are likely to follow as the record business grapples with the rise of online music copying through unauthorized services such as Napster, Kazaa and Morpheus and potentially billions of dollars in lost sales. Rather than trying to force consumers to… Read more »

England is gripped by a heady patriotic fervor these days – between the England team’s highly anticipated appearances in the 2002 World Cup and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, you can barely move without seeing a flag or banner. Yet the Brits still seem to have a little fervor left over for their American cousins, especially when those Americans happen to be the Red Hot Chili Peppers. When the Chilis took the stage for a “secret” club gig at the Garage in London on Friday (May 31), the primarily invite-only crowd erupted with an enthusiasm normally reserved for a winning goal… Read more »

Despite what Lil’ Bow Wow and Britney have shown us, stardom doesn’t always come before you can vote or get behind the wheel of a car. The past few years have been a boon for the high school (Aaron Carter, B2K, Lil’ Romeo) and graduation set (Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton). Even though it may have felt like it, it hasn’t been all teens all the time, though. Veteran acts such as U2, Nickelback, Creed, No Doubt, Train, Sugar Ray and R. Kelly have been banging the charts all along. And lately, singers like Tweet and rockers Unwritten Law and Jimmy… Read more »

They’ve delved into disturbing subject matter many times before, but with their new video for “Here to Stay,” Korn make their most direct and pointed commentary on sex and violence to date. The clip, which views like a graphic channel-surfing journey between CNN and the Discovery Channel, depicts a boy in front of a television broadcasting rapid-fire images, including a mob tipping over a car, fires, car collisions, open-heart surgery, animals mating and crocodiles attacking prey. Throughout, the band is depicted in black-and-white against a wall of TV static. In the end, the boy touches the TV screen and disappears… Read more »