Music

Finding a good dive bar band is a little like finding a good dive bar: There are plenty of imitators out there, but you know the real deal when you find it. Texas trio Midland knows a thing or two about dive bars – in fact, they just might be …

“Hold on a minute, the little doggy’s about to run away,” Robert Plant says as he puts the phone down at his home in England, on the Welsh border. After a vacation in Morocco, Plant sounds antsy as he prepares to release his new album, Carry Fire. He recorded it …

Bob Dylan’s Born Again Christian period of 1979 to 1981 – an intense, wildly controversial time that produced three albums and some of the most compelling and confrontational concerts of his long career – will be chronicled on the next chapter of Dylan’s ongoing Bootleg Series. Trouble No More – …

The Long Way Back, a new Sublime documentary, details how drug addiction ravaged the California ska-punk band after frontman Bradley Nowell’s 1996 death from a heroin overdose. The film premieres October 17th via VOD platforms, including iTunes and Amazon. The doc’s gripping trailer, premiering at Rolling Stone, highlights how Nowell’s …

Jack Johnson unearthed a song from his high school-era Minor Threat cover band during a visit to Mike D’s Beats 1 radio show The Echo Chamber. As Johnson told the Beastie Boys rapper, he and his band Limber Chicken initially planned on starting a Fugazi cover band before realizing that …

There are film snobs who like to feel superior to meat-and-potatoes action thrillers, favoring only art films meant to be deconstructed over high tea. They can screw off. My feeling is when gung-ho escapism is dished out with the enthusiasm and expertise of American Assassin, why resist? Directed by Michael …

Grant Hart, drummer and singer of the seminal alternative rock band Hüsker Dü, has died at 56 after being diagnosed with liver cancer. The news wasconfirmed by his bandmate Bob Mould on Facebook. “The tragic news of Grant’s passing was not unexpected to me,” Mould wrote. “My deepest condolences and …

Stevie Wonder delivered a rousing rendition of Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” to open the Hand in Hand telethon to benefit victims of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma. Prior to his performance, Wonder delivered a poignant message about equality and unity, as well as a sharp remark about climate change: …

Beyoncé delivered an emotional speech to Hurricane Harvey evacuees Friday at Houston’s St. John’s Church. “This today is a celebration of survival,” Beyoncé told her hometown crowd. “Y’all are my family. Houston is my home. I thank God that y’all are safe, that your children are safe. The things that …

At their peak, Big Black were some of the nastiest noisemakers in rock. Their sound was an industrial-strength miasma of piercing, static-like guitar (played with metal picks), drum-machine battery and frontman Steve Albini‘s unapologetically hateful and acrimonious lyrics about the worst aspects of humanity. So when they decided to break …