It always does my heart good when a band's Wikipedia entry starts with the present tense ("The Celibate Rifles are an Australian punk rock band... "). It lets me know that however long ago this band began (1978 or -9 for this particular Australian punk rock band, depending on whom you ask), their s…
Tomorrow, Saturday, April 20th, is Record Store Day. Across the nation, droves of rabid music fans will swarm the remaining brick and mortar music retailers, drawn by the lure of in-store performances, special sales and, most importantly, limited-edition collectibles too numerous to count. My head …
It is proving quite difficult to find out much information about Che (pronounced, we are informed here, "Shay") or Alix Plain, the person behind this project. The very minimal Allmusic entry mentions that Plain was the odd man out when his previous band, Modern Eon, broke up and the other four memb…
Jimmy Cliff might be the most prolific artist I've covered in this blog (OK, probably not more prolific than Jandek, but he's superhuman). Last year, forty-five years after his debut, he released the Tim Armstrong-produced Rebirth, which shocked the world by being both a brilliant artistic achievem…
Simon Fisher Turner seems like a fascinating individual. He has been an actor on several BBC series; recorded music under his own name (both with and without his middle name) and as The King of Luxembourg and Deux Filles; and been a member of both the Portsmouth Sinfonia Orchestra and The The. Curr…
If you're like me, odds are you hear the name Lene Lovich (or, as I recently did, find a copy of this very album in the bins at Goodwill) and instantly hear her distinctively playful yet unabashedly Teutonic voice squeaking out the hook to her best-known song, "Lucky Number." Like so many brilliant…
You might not think George Thorogood and the Destroyers would be the most obvious choice for rotation at a scrappy college station in the early '80s, but there are a couple important points you should remember:
What can I say about Slint that I didn't already say in my 2008 Spiderland post? I kept it short back then, but I pretty much covered the bases: they were an excellent band that has been very influential over the years and they were phenomenal live, even almost twenty years after anyone thought the…
In 2018, KEXP celebrated the 30th anniversary of local record label Sub Pop with a four-month retrospective, "counting up" every catalog number in their vast discography of over 1,200 releases. Dig into the archives of our catalog coverage, featuring in-depth coverage on the history of their releases.
