Get Dark With Llora’s “Bad Behavior”

Photos by Vera Velma There’s something sinister yet alluring about the music of LLORA. I imagine some early 80s dance club in Lower Manhatten as I listen to their pulsating track “Bad Behavior”. The wobbly synth that opens the track leads us into a tight electro 80s groove. We’re greeted by come hither vocals that […]

What’s The Score? Volume One : Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s ‘The Girl With All The Gifts’

Okay, so we’re not really sure when or if the world will get back to normal. At this moment we’re in a holding pattern of wait, isolate, and wear masks and gloves if you’ve gotta be around a bunch of people. My wife was downstairs making masks(well, a mask) for grocery day. A mask. This […]

Canary in a Coal Mine

The essential worker. Someone who provides essential and life-saving services and items to the public at large during times of social and national crisis. Doctors, nurses, police, firemen, grocery and retail workers, manufacturing that provides medical and life-saving equipment, and who else am I missing? These are the folks continuing to do their jobs at […]

Everything’s Ruined : RIP Adam Schlesinger

Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood wrote songs that stayed in your brain and your heart long after the music stopped. I wasn’t quite 23 when the first Fountains of Wayne album had come out, but I was well on my way to adulthood. I’d gotten married just a couple months prior to the record dropping, […]

Future Museums : Transitional Spirit Mirror EP

Neil Lord works many musical angles, finding an emotional and spiritual center in everything he does. Working with the Holodeck Records crew to curate the substantial, eclectic, and excellent roster that the Austin label hosts, as well as working in bands like the dark and electronic-driven Thousand Foot Whale Claw and shoegaze trio Single Lash. […]

Gimme Fiction

I used to read all the time. Sometimes I’d have two or three books going at the same time, jumping back and forth from Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, and Howard Zinn like I was some vernacular juggler in a literature tight wire act. Reading a book satiated a certain appetite in me that nothing else […]

Miles Runs The Voodoo Down : ‘Bitches Brew’ Turns 50

I won’t go too crazy here as this record has been talked about ad nauseum since it’s release in 1970, but I just had to talk a little about Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew as it celebrated it’s 50th anniversary on March 30th. 50 years since one of the most prolific, forward-thinking albums to hit our puny […]

Complex Distractions Presents : My Five Favorite Record Store Day Finds

So I’m sitting around waiting for civilization to fall into mass chaos and a chasm of insanity we have not seen before and I thought to myself, “Hmm, what should I write about this week?” This is something I do every Sunday(not the whole mass chaos/chasm of insanity jag), I work out what I’ll be […]

Saturday Isolatin’

Well my week home from work(vacation, not closed…Capitalism, baby) is nearly done. Maybe it’s the fact that I chose to stay home, as opposed to being told I can’t work and I can’t make a living made the week a pleasant one. Read quite a bit, spun a lot of records, created some music, and […]

A Gift To You

In times of worry I’ve always been the one to want to make things better. As a little kid if my mom was upset about something I was in my room making her a picture or offering to do the dishes so she didn’t have to. If the mood was tense I was the clown, […]