Feature

This is a documentary executive produced by the members of Green Day, narrated by Iggy Pop, chronicling the scene in which Green Day, Rancid, and others came up in. Sounds like an amazing journey. Well, you’d be about half right. While this film is somewhat definitive and tells the story in only a way that punk rockers could tell, it feels like a hefty hardback book. At over two-and a-half hours, it pushes the patience of even the most diehard Green Day or punk follower. But it does get a number of things right while going in circles to do…

As anyone who has read this site since I joined almost five years ago, Faith No More is my be-all end all band of all time. There have been at least two books in the last 25 years that chronicled the band, but Adrian Harte’s chronicle, complete with new interviews with everyone in the band’s history (minus Jim Martin and Mike Patton) is as definitive a piece as you’ll ever get. With almost minute detail about the band’s early years all the way through their breakthrough with “Epic” and The Real Thing, fans and non-fans will find themselves ecstatic about…

This Kickstarter-funded documentary about the making of Steve Wozniak’s brainchild, the US Festival, focuses on the first one from 1982. While one would’ve loved full-length performances from the likes of Oingo Boingo, English Beat, and Gang Of Four, some of the more defiantly different bands of the era, you get full-lengths from the artists that are primarily interviewed like The Police, Tom Petty, and Fleetwood Mac. It’s an interesting piece to watch, but it feels more like vignettes over a full-length film. There are stops and starts throughout, much like chapters on a DVD player, so it doesn’t make the…

It’s an exciting time to be a concert-goer in the Milwaukee area these days! With the recent completion of a brand new arena (Fiserv Forum), for the first time in decades there is a legitimate reason for big name artists to pencil in southeastern Wisconsin on their tour schedules. The Forum has seen some famous bands open the place up: Maroon 5 and The Killers kicked things off earlier this month. But truly it was last Friday’s performer who was attracting all the attention, and his concert marked the beginning of Milwaukee’s “Big City” renaissance. That man was Justin Timberlake.…

 I know you're tiredAnd you ain't sleeping wellUninspiredAnd likely mad as hellBut wherever you areI hope the high road leads you home again- Jason Isbell, “Hope The High Road”Hanging onto your idealism these days can feel like hard work. Every day there’s some piece of news that makes you shake your head, that feels almost designed to make you feel a little more cynical or a little more hopeless. And then along comes a guy like Jason Isbell—an Alabama-born singer-songwriter with a hell-raising past and barely half a dozen years of sobriety, singing artful, incisive songs about hope and connection…

I ended up seeing Band Of Horses live in Richmond, VA after friends from Lynchburg were unable to attend and gave me their tickets, and I was at least slightly impressed. Let me explain.First off, anyone who knows me and my musical taste knows I am the farthest thing from mellow. So, when openers Bonny Doom took the stage, I was underwhelmed. The music wasn’t bad; it was like a mixture of Luna with mid-career Wilco. There were moments when the band were ready to rock out, but then it was just a tease and they went back to their…

So by now it seems every band, good or bad, has a documentary about them – everyone from Kings Of Leon and One Direction to Foo Fighters and Circle Jerks. Some are great, some are bland, and others are just eh. This film about U.K. female punk/dub pioneers The Slits unfortunately falls into the bland category. There’s nothing wrong with the band at all; it’s just the film feels a little flat and could’ve used a little bit more love, like the recent L7 documentary. All female led, not selling sex, full of energy and reggae and dub influences, The…

Yeah, okay, fine, he wrote that song on the radio, the one that went “Ev-uh-ree-thing’s gonna be alright / Rock-a-bye” while extending “everything” to four distinctly enunciated syllables and most of an octave—but Shawn Mullins is and always has been so much more than that one magical earworm. By the time “Lullaby” and the album it sprang from, Soul’s Core, came out in 1998, Mullins had already been an active recording artist for nearly a decade, and he’s kept at it steadily ever since, building a repertoire of soulful Americana that reaches into blues, country, rock and pop in search…

The first three albums released by Last Charge Of The Light Horse, the vehicle for the songs and voice of Long Island singer-songwriter-guitarist Jean-Paul Vest, each won Indie and/or Album Of The Year awards from yours truly in the Daily Vault’s annual “Best Of” recaps. The January release of the group’s fourth full-length Race To The Sound thus immediately qualifies as an event. And it lives up to expectations; from narrating the creator’s eternal battle with self-doubt, to examining a particularly twisted relationship, to celebrating burdens suddenly lifted, Race To The Sound is filled with searing moments of insight described…

When famous Cuban American singer Celia Cruz took the stage at the Zaire ‘74 festival to sing her hit song “Quimbara,” all the well-known elements of her dynamic stage shows were present: her ecstatic dancing, loud outfits, big hair, and unmistakably powerful voice. The mostly Zairean audience members were exceptionally responsive to Cruz’s vivacious display of Latin American rhythms and cultures. This was unsurprising given that she had already become a global force, as had the salsa music movement she helped spearhead. B.B. King, James Brown, and Miriam Makeba also performed at Zaire ‘74. But, singing and dancing amidst the…