Music Journalism

The Ocean journey to the depths of their namesake, and return with one of this year's best albums.

Richard Magarey has facial hair, pigtails, a closetful of schoolgirl outfits and an endless supply of energy. In Tokyo, he became the world’s unlikeliest death metal superstar.

Back in 2013 there was a survey done by film data resea

Joel Grind takes us on a career-spanning tour of the blackened thrash demon that is Toxic Holocaust on this career-spanning compilation.

Punk, metal, rap and hip hop are flourishing in Myanmar’s biggest city, where bands from rival genres come together to put on gigs; we discover the bars where they perform, and why some play outdoors under expressway flyovers

Musician Wu Zhuoling is our guide for a tour of the Sichuan capital’s indie music bars and clubs, where you can find musicians playing rock, acoustic, jazz and electronic music, or just jamming together

Chinese city’s thriving music scene offers promise of the big time, but the reality of life as a professional musician is often far from glamorous

Global non-profit group Turning Tables has staged concerts in troubled countries like Tunisia, Lebanon, and Libya to help young people express themselves creatively. Now Asia is also starting to reap the benefits

There’s a moment in the new Netflix documentary series, The Defiant Ones, about the rise of producer/record company guru Jimmy Iovine and rap icon Dr Dre, when Dre’s band mate in World Class Wreckin’ Cru, Alonzo Williams, describes the first time he laid a new school beat over an old school R&B jam at his Compton club, Eve After Dark. On the decks one night, Dre mashed up Please Mr Postman by the Marvelettes and the 122 BPM cut off the B side of Jive Rhythm Trax by Willesden Dodgers. “People was still groovin,’ they was groovin’ confused though,” Williams says. Confusion often

Metalcore is still king in capital city Yangon, but black and death metal are gaining ground in this troubled Southeast Asian political hotbed.

Despite a lack of resources and endless bureaucratic red tape, the Cuban extreme metal scene is flourishing.

In Taiwan, choosing a life in the underground punk and metal scene means going against everything the dominant culture holds dear.

From Kathmandu to the hinterlands of the Himalayan foothills, extreme metal gains a foothold in the second-highest country on earth.

Bangladesh's most densely populated city also boasts its highest concentration of killer death, black, and thrash metal bands.

Music journalism is a ravenous creature at the best of times. As soon as the vicious hell-hound hunts down a particularly succulent piece of information, it grabs hold with vice-like mandibles and doesn’t let go until it’s ground to paste. Facts, outright lies and half-truths are disseminated in equal amounts, and the beast moves on to the next kill. Sebadoh singer/songwriter Lou Barlow (you might also know him as the bassist for seminal alt-rock group Dinosaur Jr.) knows this well. In the lead up to the much-hyped September release of Defend Yourself, Sebadoh’s first new album in 14 years, Barlow

Japan — the country that has birthed such musical oddities and game changers as Boredoms, Melt Banana, Merzbow, Sete Star Sept, and Babymetal. Okay, maybe the less said about the latter the better, but nevertheless, you can’t deny the fact that the country has fostered an inordinate proportion of bands that have melded, fused, deconstructed and reinvented the entire scope of musicopia. There’s something about the Land of the Rising Sun that nurtures a particular breed of musician that isn’t comfortable simply coloring within the lines. Call it a reactionary movement against Japanese culture’s overall air of conformity and conservative

The best music is filled with violence of the flesh and the soul. The incalculable beauty, the relative superfluity or value of song — all are more often than not determined by a troubled mind guiding a hand prone to vice. That vice can be anger and violence itself. From Charles Mingus to Anton Newcombe to Eugene Robinson, the tempest has sometimes been self-inflicted. At others it has been brought on by a deliberate provocation courtesy of one of those addled souls who has been sucked into the swirl. Violence attracts. It releases its practitioners and victims and willing participants

There was a time when The Clash were called “The only band that matters.” Yeah, it was a marketing ploy by the band’s label, CBS, but it caught on. People took to it because The Clash were looked to as one of the bands in the late ‘70s early ‘80s that was supposed to see off the lumbering, bloated dinosaur that was rock ‘n’ roll. Well, forget The Clash. Forget the Sex Pistols. Forget all the bands of their ilk that were supposedly destroying music as we knew it, ripping down its very foundations while ushering in the snarling first

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing.” Jack Kerouac, literary patron saint of white Catholic guilt, speaking through the character Sal Paradise in On the Road. Most of us, we’re wrapped up in commonplace things. The usual. The mundane. The conversations with outcomes a foregone conclusion. The songs much the same. The million and one nothings that congeal us into the great nonthreatening middle ground. That’s why we’re

You rarely come across people who are so supremely dedicated to both a form of music and the kind of lifestyle that music dictates than you do in the hardcore scene. Hardcore seems to breed lifers like no other genre. Roger Miret and Vinnie Stigma from Agnostic Front. Lou and Pete Koller of Sick Of It All. Madball’s Freddie Cricien. John Joseph of the Cro-Mags. All have stuck it out for decades through good times and bad, struggling against innumerable hardships and staying with the music they love not because they chose it, but because it chose them. Another name

“I have no idea about the man Dan Bejar.” Reading through the lines of an e-mail interview with Vancouver-based singer/songwriter Dan Bejar is a master class in the inner workings of the occidental pop/rock psyche. Famous first as a member of The New Pornographers, then with his own far more prolific invention, Destroyer (which actually predates TNP), Bejar is something of an enigma in the indie world. That fluid sort of stylist who seems to move so seamlessly between genres you can’t tell if he’s being intentionally ironic, deliberately obtuse, unconventionally brilliant or some combination of all three. Nearing his mid-forties,

Most artists adapt themselves to the musical climate around them. It is only the rare few who exert their will upon music itself, changing it to their own whims, creating something entirely new in the process. Herbie Hancock has spent a lifetime in music doing the latter. Be it jazz, funk, hip hop, R&B or electronic music, the multiple Grammy Award-winning pianist, composer, and band leader has found a way to not merely influence, but alter multiple genres of music, putting his indelible imprint on them in ways other musicians could only dream of. Then again, if you want to

At what point does music become commercial? If music is your full-time job, meaning you have to put a new album out every one or two years in order to survive, does the fact that you have to produce something make the music that comes out more of a product than a piece of art? I’m talking about real creativity here, ladies and gentlemen, posers and artists among you. If music is governed by thoughts of, “I need to get this record done so I can pay my rent,” rather than, “I need to get this record out so people

Aldous Huxley had it that, and I’m paraphrasing here, our friends serve as an entity we inflict upon that which we cannot inflict upon our enemies. If that’s true, then punk rock has been our friend for far too long. It started out as the enemy with proto-punk in a time when bands like Death (from Detroit, not the Floridian progenitors of death metal), the Stooges and the MC5 stalked the earth with great gargantuan fuzz boxes buzzing and driving beat cylinders firing, flexing terrible Michigan-bred muscle. Then as soon as the Ramones and the Sex Pistols broke big, right around

“Is the play offensive? I certainly hope so; it was my intention to offend — as well as amuse and entertain.” This was Edward Albee talking about his play, The American Dream, in 1961; a work that explores the patent falsity of its namesake. Substitute “music” for “play” and you could just as easily have a musician perhaps more eruditely than usual waxing philosophical on the aim and intent of punk 16 years later. Amuse. Entertain. Offend. The inalienable punk credo. And not necessarily in that order. That last part of the equation is where some musicians tend to get confused.

The venues musicians play at can become just as important as the bands themselves, sometimes even more so. I’m not talking about those shiny corporate boxes that make you feel like you should have your Sunday best on just to walk through the doors, but those beautiful, grimy sweat boxes where you can see the perspiration soaked into the walls and breathe in years of angst and expression along with hazardous mutations of black mold as yet unnamed by science. It almost goes without saying that Underworld (地下社會) was just such a place to the Taipei music scene, and a

It’s goddamn cold out there. I’m not talking about the weather, though as I write this there is that typical late winter/early spring drizzle chilling the city to its mildewed bones. I’m talking about life in general; about the fact that you can put your heart and soul into something, bleed yourself completely dry mentally, physically, financially and still have everything crash down around you. It’s been a cold year for John Kevill, vocalist of LA-area thrashers Warbringer. From 2004 up to last year, Kevill along with founding guitarist John Laux, guitarist Adam Carroll who joined shortly after the band’s

You rarely come across people who are so supremely dedicated to both a form of music and the kind of lifestyle that music dictates than you do in the hardcore scene. Hardcore seems to breed lifers like no other genre. Roger Miret and Vinnie Stigma from Agnostic Front. Lou and Pete Koller of Sick Of It All. Madball’s Freddie Cricien. John Joseph of the Cro-Mags. All have stuck it out for decades through good times and bad, struggling against innumerable hardships and staying with the music they love not because they chose it, but because it chose them. Another name

Breaking up is hard to do. Or so it seems. In music, the parting of ways is made all the more complicated when the warring factions can’t agree on what belongs to who. Much like a divorcing couple with a throw rug that really ties the room together, band members in the midst of a split have to find some means, amicable or otherwise, of deciding who keeps the name, the music, the legacy. Things can get ugly, not the least of which when it comes to the name. People are petty creatures, loathe to give up that which they’ve

In exploring the musical juxtaposition of the polar elements melancholy and joy, you trace it back to its Slavic roots and come up with names like Shostakovitch, Salmanov, Garayev and others who expanded upon it in contemporary times. Describing the process of becoming acquainted with the latter, Azerbaijani painter Tahir Sahalov said, “This is the only way to get deep inside an artist — through music. Everything trivial and insignificant — the things one pays attention to during mundane, everyday meetings — disappears. Only the essence of a man is left.” On the latest album of German pianist and composer Volker

They say you should write with your audience in mind. I’ve never fully understood that. If anything, the audience should be treated with a healthy dose of contempt. All things should. Government. Vapid celebrities. Anti-vaxxers. The entire grim morass deserving of little more than naked antipathy and unveiled skepticism. Italian painter and sculptor Alberto Burri wasn’t thinking of the critics wet lips puckered against his backside when he was singeing petroleum byproducts and melting PVC in the name of eccentric abstraction. Nor should metal bands be dreaming of being critical darlings when they seek to achieve the equivalent with their

Supergroups rarely work out the way we hope they will, at least for that first fleeting instant when the project is initially announced. It’s almost always the same. On paper, the meeting of brilliant and eclectic minds looks like a surefire recipe for pure musical alchemy. Then, partly due to impossibly high expectations that nothing short of the second coming of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention could have satisfied, the project falls flat in its face. Lou Reed on his own was one of the most important innovators in the history of modern popular music. Lou Reed with

Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park recently said rock isn’t influencing the zeitgeist. Why mention Linkin Park (and I mean ever)? Bear with me. Where do you go if rock isn’t moving the proverbial cultural yardsticks? You’ve got to get weird. All the way weird. I’m talking beyond Zorn and Zappa levels of oddness. When was the last time rock did anything but get bloated, fat and boring? When did it last do anything but suckle the fat teats of corporate radio? Who knows? I certainly don’t. By and large I gave up, tuned out and dropped out when Nickelback broke

“And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Nietzsche wrote that in Beyond Good and Evil, and say what you will about the man, he was on to something there. Not a Nietzsche fan? Lamb of God front man Randy Blythe put it another way when he said, “When I write, I have to be able to go to that darker place. I don’t have trouble getting there; the problem is not staying there.” It’s a conundrum artists and introspective types from all circles have wrestled with since humankind first had the

Everything warped and twisted and perverted and wonderful about human nature you can find boiling quietly out of the Greater Tokyo Area’s cramped back alleys and painfully sterile, orderly streets. You can see it reflected clearly in the great black eyeballs of the giant crows perched and cawing on the city’s power cables and phone lines that look like they could pick a man’s corpse clean if given half a chance. You can almost hear it bubbling out of the skin of the thousands of commuters packed silently onto the trains whisking like star cruisers out of Shinjuku Station in

Before getting into the usual business, it’s worth talking about the tragic events that unfolded in Paris last week. What takes place partway around the world might not seem to have have much to do with what goes on music-wise here in Taipei, but it’s all related. The extremists who laid siege to Le Bataclan didn’t attack a target that was of military or religious significance — not in the traditional sense. They sought to level as much death as their automatic weapons would allow upon the progressive, liberal and by and large youthful heart of Paris. They attempted to pierce

A private party thrown to celebrate the opening of Taiwan’s first GAP outlet drew more of a crowd than a performance by American shock rock veteran Rob Zombie in Taipei on March 7. The celebrity-strewn gala thrown on the street below ATT Showbox in the Xinyi District brought in the usual crowd of gawkers hoping to catch a fleeting glimpse of someone dubiously famous with the siren call of thumping house music. Meanwhile, Showbox had the curtain pulled, closing off half the premises so as not to subject Zombie, guitarist John 5, bassist Piggy D, and unearthly drummer Ginger Fish