Search Results for: pop punk

At the Jonas Brothers’ family home in New Jersey, a wooden sign over the bathroom door reads “Patience is a virtue.” It’s a lesson the Brothers are lucky to have learned. Though the pop-punk boy band is riding high at iTunes and Radio Disney on the strength of “Year 3000,” the brothers have taken an unexpectedly circuitous route to success. The Jonas Brothers — Nick, 14, Joe, 17, and Kevin, 19 — were born as a band in 2005, when incoming Columbia Records president Steve Greenberg was handed a stack of CDs by Columbia artists with whom he wasn’t familiar.… Read more »

Around the time Brett Gurewitz was launching Epitaph Records in 1981, his father was lecturing him to take guitar lessons. The Bad Religion guitarist and punk-rock entrepreneur never sat down for courses with a guitar instructor, although he did go to school to learn to be a recording engineer. However, no amount of schooling could have prepared Gurewitz for the next 25 years of his life. Epitaph Records brought a new era of punk rock to the masses in 1994 when the Offspring’s “Smash” turned into one of the biggest rock records of the decade. The success of the label’s… Read more »

As far as explanatory statements from musicians go, this one by Relient K frontman Matt Thiessen about his band’s new album, Five Score and Seven Years Ago, sort of takes the cake for general awesomeness: “We had already come up with the title of the album, so I decided to write some lyrics about John Wilkes Booth. I hope people don’t think it’s a concept record about Abraham Lincoln or anything like that.” Gee, why would anyone think that? After all, there are tons of albums out there that nick their title from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (“Four score and seven… Read more »

Few things are sadder than aging punk rockers attempting to cash in on their misspent youth, especially their desperate act of trying to recapture the glory days of fickle preadolescents with disposable incomes. Such is the lot of Good Charlotte and Simple Plan, purveyors of a Splenda version of pop-punk so lightweight that only Top 40 radio will touch it. Not that the bands resemble glossy pop stars, per se: GC’s members look like thugged-out suburbanites who overdosed at the tattoo parlor, and the Plansters are the mischievous skater kids hellbent on crashing keggers thrown by the football jocks. Good… Read more »

Drummer Derrick Plourde – a founding member of Southern California punk band Lagwagon – and Hideaki Sekiguchi – who slapped the bass for Tokyo garage-punk band Guitar Wolf – both died Wednesday, news that sent shockwaves throughout the underground punk rock world. Plourde was 33, and Sekiguchi was 38. Fat Wreck Chords, which released Lagwagon’s earliest material, confirmed Plourde’s death in a statement posted to the indie label’s Web site, which read, in part, “March 30th was a sad day for the Fat Wreck Chords family, as we learned about the passing of Derrick Plourde. We consider him one of… Read more »

New York – Hours earlier, Hilly Kristal joined rock’s royalty inside a Waldorf-Astoria ballroom for the latest Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions. By the morning, though, Kristal sips a cup of coffee and pops an antacid as he considers the future of his own piece of rock history: CBGB’s, the venerable birthplace of punk. After 32 years in business, the world-renowned club on the Bowery is in danger of losing its lease. “Even at this Hall of Fame thing, people were coming up and asking, ‘What can we do? What can we do?’” Kristal recalls, sitting at his… Read more »

Los Angeles – California pop-punk trio Blink-182, famed for its practical jokes and disdain for clothing, has gone on “indefinite hiatus,” with no plans to work together again, its Geffen Records label said Tuesday. Singer-guitarist Tom DeLonge, singer-bassist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker want to “spend some time enjoying the fruits of their labors with loved ones” after a decade of working together nonstop, the statement added. “While there is no set plan for the band to begin working together again, no one knows what tomorrow may bring,” it said. San Diego-based Blink-182, cast in the same mold as… Read more »

Los Angeles – A few days ago, a colleague asked if it would be possible to get a Green Day poster for his 12-year-old daughter. “She’s always listened to nothing but rap and hip-hop,” the editor said, “but lately she’s been obsessed with the Green Day album ‘American Idiot.”‘ Warner Bros. Records chairman/CEO Tom Whalley relates a similar story. He says a couple of his teenage daughter’s friends who stopped by the house were evidently unaware that the red-hot punk trio is the prize act of the moment on Whalley’s label. But they knew the band was cool. “They said,… Read more »

Having his solo debut tank might have been the best thing for Butch Walker’s career. Not too many people bought 2002’s Left of Self-Centered – the album sold barely 20,000 copies, according to SoundScan – but many of those who did adored the smart riff-rock from the guy who used to front the late-’90s power trio Marvelous 3. Not only did Walker sing and play all the instruments except drums, he also produced, mixed and engineered the LP. Such versatile qualities appealed to a lot of people, not least of whom was Avril Lavigne. “Obviously, it was a very unpopular… Read more »

Green Day will toast the release of American Idiot on Tuesday, but perhaps an even bigger cause for celebration these days is the 10-year anniversary of their breakthrough LP, Dookie. The modern-day classic not only launched the Bay Area punk trio into the mainstream, it opened the door to a mid-’90s wave of popped-up punk and provided a launching pad for the current crop of melodic pop-punkers. “[Dookie] changed my life,” confessed Good Charlotte’s Joel Madden. “It made me want to start Good Charlotte…. Right after that record came out, we were like, ‘We have to start a band in… Read more »