Todd A

[This piece appears in All the Rage.]

The Creeping Cruds and Halloween go together like chocolate and peanut butter. Their brief, aggressive tunes have plenty of shout-along chorus about “eating the living‿ and “M-U-R-D-E-R‿ but they’ve also got plenty of sweet guitar licks that land just on the tasteful side of shredding. In short, this Nashville-based horror-punk band owes as much to the Misfits as they do to ZZ Top. All The Rage got together with Jeano Roid, one of the Cruds’ two axe-murderers, to talk scary stuff. (continue reading…)

[This piece appears in All the Rage]

The story of Sweden’s Shout Out Louds starts, like the stories of so many precocious bands, in an art school where singer Adam Olenius met guitarist Carl von Arbin. Adam taught Ted Malmros to play bass and the trio started gigging with an old drum machine. Eventually, as the trio honed their sound, they recruited an actual drummer and keyboardist. (continue reading…)

[This piece appeared in the City Paper.]

Martina McBride
Timeless
RCA Records Label

“It all begins with a song‿—the old songwriters’ adage—proves perfectly apt in the case of Martina McBride’s newest album, Timeless. For this record (her first solo production), Martina chose to pay homage to her roots by recording an album of classic country songs. The result is an 18-song tribute to the beauty of country music’s heritage sung by one of the genre’s present-day greats. (continue reading…)

[This piece appears in All the Rage]

Even if you haven’t yet seen Harper—one of the city’s newest and brightest pop bands—you may recognize the faces. Singer/guitarist Ben Harper played bass for Feable Weiner until earlier this year. Guitarist/keyboardist Raf Cevallos once played in The Pink Spiders and currently plays in The Darling Hearts. Bassist Keith Lowen plays in The Privates and was once a member of Lifeboy along with drummer Sam Smith. All the Rage gathered with the band in the studio where they are recording their debut album. (continue reading…)

I’ve looked at this a number of ways and I haven’t really come to any decent conclusions, so I’m just going to run this by you. When you’re at a little cookout get-together and you’ve had a giant glass and a half of wine and you’re acting a little sillier than usual and then, while leaning back in your chair, the chair slips and you end up on the deck, what do you do?

For starters, there is now no way you will be able to convince anyone that you are remotely sober, even when it was legitimately the chair’s goddam fault. (Not to mention the slippery deck.) I suppose you could start laughing. I mean, it is pretty funny. You could roll out of the chair and dust yourself off. You could sort of awkwardly reach for help since you’re kind of trapped in the chair now.

But you’re not going to be able to make an hilarious off-the-cuff crack about it. Because there’s something about the sudden shift from vertical to horizontal that will catch you the hell off guard.

So here’s what I’ve found–and mind you, I’m not admitting to anything. One of those slow falls back in a decently soft chair with a half bottle of wine in you is actually pretty damn fun. So while other party-goers may think you’re trashed in an admittedly gauche way, you’re like “let’s go again.” Even though you’ll never recapture that initial surprise that you felt as you leaned back and just kept going.

So don’t say anything. Because you already look like an idiot.