Tag: torso
Punx Not Dead in Petaluma – Home Sick 2 at the Pheonix Theater
Nicole Verto
January 30, 2019
“Is punk dead?” I’ve typically found this refrain loathsome and lazy. Despite my ongoing aversion to the utterance, it was front and center in my own (traitor) brain during the week leading up to Home Sick 2. You see, after almost forty years, the punk institution known as Maximum Rocknroll announced that the zine would cease printing in 2019. The notion hit me hard. I recalled being fourteen and seeing MRR for the first time as a young teenager and traced from there to the first time I saw the rows and rows of green-taped records myself. It felt like a death. I went to three other shows in the days between the announcement and attending Home Sick 2 but HS2 was the one that really shook me out of my cynicism. Of course punk is not dead. Of course the community is still growing and reaching folks of all ages. Even better: those of us already in too deep seem to be better than ever at welcoming other sounds into our spaces. The curators behind Home Sick (none other than headliners Ceremony) managed to again create a space both familiar and refreshingly representative of this constant evolution happening within
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Midnight Massacre: American Nightmare At The Echoplex
Rob Shepyer
March 18, 2018
Like a long, dooming swing of the reaper’s scythe, death rock and hardcore rained down upon us as if by the hand of Death itself. Since the headliner was hardcore, one might not expect two death rock bands opening up the show but when you consider the history of American Nightmare, it’s not so strange at all. American Nightmare has always highlighted the darker, more gothic side of the human experience to the point that Wesley Eisold, the band’s singer, evolved into Cold Cave, a goth, dark wave sensation. Never straying too far from his roots though, Eisold always kept American Nightmare in his back pocket. Perhaps now he’s wearing those pants back-side front. It’s too sides of the same coin, anyway. A sad, depressed crooner making music you can dance your sorrow away to and a rage-filled banshee that inspires blood-lust, violence, and anarchy in mosh pits that flood onto the stage. American Nightmare was the first band in the hardcore scene to really delve into emotional, darker lyrics and tones while not straying from true hardcore and the scene. The first band to open up the evening was Death Bells, a young death rock outfit from Sydney, Australia that
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