Sons of Tonatiuh
Sons of Tonatiuh

Real nasty spawn, these Sons of Tonatiuh, born under a bridge in the worst part of Atlanta, left to muckrake a miserable existence from wee hellions with pockets full of coal to teenage pariahs with duffel bags full of stolen goods, now barely alive, toothless and hungry, channeling their anti-social behaviour into a rent-by-the-hour racket. This here self-titled full-length debut is what happens when street urchins demand to be heard; ugly, crusty, disease-ridden doom that’s lost all sense of control and shoved a twisted scrap of sheet metal into your leg just to get at that moldy, half-eaten sandwich in your pocket. Socially morbid, squeegee-bleed, spastic death metal with the rank odor of sewer water, fetching flies and whores, holding dominion over the unseen, chemically ruined, appalling and bloated rot, lecherous companion to all kinds of Black Cobras, Weedeaters, and Scum. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Listen to “From Ashes” from Sons of Tonatiuh!

The Main Street Gospel
Love Will Have Her Revenge

Blowin’ in on the winds of yesteryear is The Main Street Gospel, a country-psych band with ties to Brian Jonestown Massacre and a sound so steeped in nostalgia and tradition you gotta blow the dust off of it just to discover the true treasure it really is. Love Will Have Her Revenge, the Ohio trio’s debut, is a laid back approach to the usual foot-stomp of mustache rock, and gets its point across by way of delicate pop melodies, tin cup blues, and breezy jams. While none of the songs here are exceptionally overpowering in their virility, they do have amazing breadth, depth, and reach, like the thick roots of an old and impressive tree. Not only that, but they shake and hum at times with a journeyman vibe, as the longest songs on deck (“Fool’s Gold,” “Ready to Shine,” and “She’s a Disease”) draw you into a solitary world of lonely rural squatting and the hallucinations it might induce with their 70s-inspired freak-folk rock. You’ll be able to hear a wide array of influences on this one, like Neil Young, Wilco, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Dead Meadow, and Blood Meridian, but in the end it’s just good ol’ rock n’ roll — vulnerable, honest, heartfelt, and a tad trippy.

Check out  MSG performing the title track from Love Will Have Her Revenge!

Biters
It’s OK to Like Biters

Another Biters EP? Oh, that’s right, Jack. I guess releasing one outta-this-world album in 2010 wasn’t enough for these power pop superheroes because they’ve gone ahead and dropped yet another five-song masterpiece on us like a sack full o’ diamonds. Seriously, if they keep this up my heart’s gonna explode in a shower of cocktail napkin confetti. But really, can you think of a better way to go? Sure, you’re saying, when I’m balls deep in a teenage scream queen. Well, I got news for ya, friend. This is better than that. I’ll take your juicy thighs and smeared lipstick and raise you an orgy of rock n’ roll, cotton candy, jungle cats, wet tongues, and champagne bubbles. It’s just all sorts of crazy good stuff, ya know? When I had a go at their self-titled EP, I said that  if the Biters weren’t the biggest band in the world real soon that we’d all be doomed, and I believe that now more than ever. So do the Biters apparently, who are doing their part by releasing the most amazing music at a roller-skate pace. It may be OK to like Biters, but it’s better to fucking love Biters. In fact, it’s pretty much mandatory.

Listen to “Melody For Lovers” from It’s OK to Like Biters!

Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan
Hawk

Yeah, okay, so the folksy, sultry tunes of Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan don’t exactly fall in with the rank and file of doom, metal, and stoner rock that you usually find around here, but the fact of the matter is — if you don’t know this already — Lanegan is a bad-ass, whiskey-voiced deity in the Broken Beard universe. The guy could put out a polka record and I’d still tell you about it because everything he touches (Screaming Trees, The Gutter Twins, Soulsavers, etc.) turns to pure grit, which is what makes his collaborations with Isobel Campbell so great. She, former member of indie pop band Belle & Sebastian, is innocence incarnate, the Scottish girl-next-door with the porcelain voice, and he is the brooding American desperado at the end of the bar. Put ‘em together and you get an old suitcase full of black and white photographs, tear-stained love letters, faded memories, long distance calls from a phone booth in the middle of nowhere, and wordless nights on a porch swing. Hawk, their third album together, is a whole barn full o’ jukebox flare, rustling up a roving range of country-folk, blues, soul, gospel, and Americana, calling to mind the eras and auras of Cash and Carter, Dylan and Baez. Campell’s songwriting on Hawk is utterly moving, playing emotion better than any instrument on the album, and is at once light, languid, deep, and desolate. To help the mood along, the album also offers a few Townes Van Zandt covers and a couple of appearances by Willy Mason. But, as always, this is the Campbell and Lanegan show, which continues to be the strangest, most beautiful show on earth.

Check out the video for “You Won’t Le Me Down Again” from Hawk!

Red Giant
Dysfunctional Majesty

Red Giant have always been somewhat of an enigma. They disappear for years at a time and just when you think you’ve forgotten all about ‘em, they show up at your door one day, ten stories tall, clutching a sledgehammer in one hand and a cluster of planets in the other hand, a shit-eating grin like a chasm on their face. Then all of a sudden it’s like they never went anywhere at all, and the reason they’ve only put out two albums in the last eleven years (1999′s Ultra-Magnetic Glowing Sound and 2004′s Devil Child Blues) is because they’re thick-chested overlords of the cosmic mean machine with some heavy duty responsibilities, like riding high atop choppers of flame into the heart of interstellar battle, forging lunar wars in the name of universal dominion. Only when they’ve defeated their space foes and captured the black skies above us do they settle down to tell tales of their conquests via macho, bubbling, dope n’ roll songs. Their latest episode, Dysfunctional Majesty, is another batch of bad-ass biker metal blues cut from blood-soaked denim and bathroom walls, which means it sounds like AC/DC, Alabama Thunderpussy, Beggar’s Ball, Dixie Witch, and any one of Wino’s bands all at once, in case you’re having trouble remembering. However, dig the Clutch-like groove on “These Satisfactions are Permanent” and the Sleep-like doom of “Silver Shirley” for some new twists on their gruesome, galactic sound. Hop on board this one, friends, because it’s one hell of an awesome ride and who knows when they’ll be back around for another spin.

Listen to “Chopper” from Dysfunctional Majesty!

Buy Dysfunctional Majesty from Small Stone!

First though, the rundown. Stefaniuk plays Joey, the self-absorbed leader of The Winners, and he and his band have just been dumped by their manager Jeff (Dave Foley). Despite being at their lowest, they stick to their plans to make it from Montreal to Toronto and down the Eastern US seaboard in order to play a showcase gig attended by industry insiders, movers and shakers. However, before leaving Montreal, the band’s bass player, Jennifer (Jessica Paré), leaves a gig with a powder-faced dandy named Queeny (played by Burning Brides singer/guitarist Dimitri Coats), goes to a party, and gets turned into a blood-sucker. When she arrives at the next city, there’s something noticeably different about her, and suddenly, people start taking a bit of an interest in the band, particularly its sexy bass player. Jennifer tries to hide her new affliction, but when she starts feeding on people along the way, the band’s funny French roadie, Hugo, discovers her secret and, as a good roadie is wont to do, helps her take care of it.

One night, after devouring Beef Bellows (played by Moby), the lead singer of the band Secretaries of Steak, Joey and the rest of the band get hip to Jennifer’s vamped ways. They all agree that it must be kept a secret and that she can’t turn any of the other band members into vampires. That proves difficult, and soon enough Jennifer ends up biting the guitarist and the drummer. Now Joey’s the only one who’s not a vampire, and repeated visits/visions from some bartender/Lucifer/head vampire dude (played by Alice Cooper) urging him to embrace the vampire ways and fulfill his dreams of becoming famous, is making it hard for him not to sell out, as it were. Speaking on behalf of the other side of the coin is super- producer Victor (played by Iggy Pop), who is urging Joey to not give in to the hype and remain true to himself, etc. Finally, though, Joey opts for selling out, either because he wants to be famous or because he’s totally in love with Jennifer.

The Winners become overnight sensations, an exploding IT band, with a new populist following. However, they can’t control their thirsty ways and even feed on radio DJ Rockin’ Roger (played by Henry Rollins) live on the air. This doesn’t seem to bother anyone except Eddie Van Helsing (Malcolm McDowell), the eye-patched vampire hunter who’s been trailing them all tour, hoping to destroy them and get his hands on the ultimate prize, Queeny, the dude who killed his wife many years ago. The movie winds down with the band opting for the high road once and for all, so they collaborate with Van Helsing who has a plan that will make them human again and help him exact his revenge on Queeny.

So yeah, Suck is a bit boring, but what it lacks in action it makes up for in wit. The roadie, Hugo, is the funniest of the bunch, the bilingual fall guy with some clever one liners, and having noted shock rocker Alice Cooper play the dude urging Joey to embrace the shtick appeal seems wholly apropos. Also, Moby is a well-known vegetarian, so his role in this film is all cow tongue in cheek, and it works, and naming the band The Winners when they are obviously anything but, works as well.

However, what I enjoyed most about this movie was playing the album cover game. It was the one thing that kept my interest all the way through. See, Stefaniuk put scenes in this movie that were near exact shots of famous album covers, and once I got hip to it, I spent the rest of the time searching them out. Here are the covers I discovered, in no particular order: The Beatles’ Abbey Road, T Rex’s Electric Warrior, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, The Who’s The Kids Are All Right, and The Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet. Also, the scene where Joey talks with Alice Copper at the crossroad’s is a Robert Johnson homage, and there was one scene that I thought might have been The Beatles’ Yesterday and Today, but wasn’t quite sure. Anyway, there could’ve been more I didn’t pick up on, so go ahead and get this movie and see what you can find!

*Yup, that’s what she said.

Check out the trailer for Suck!

Souvenir’s Young America
The Name of the Snake

Souvenir’s Young America hollow out a small part of your mind in order to separate themselves from the dense din of all the instrumental post-rock and experimental metal out there, and in that crater they lay something so remarkably vast, so terribly scary, that a mere whisper of its presence alerts you to your certain doom. Not that the Virginia band’s latest album, The Name of the Snake, is abundantly evil, it’s just that it exudes a numbing solitude that borders on hallucination desolation. The four songs laid down here (you get three bonus tracks from their September Songs EP as well if you happen to have the CD) moan like a five-hundred-year-old desert wind, beat on the old, dry, cracked earth like a chain-gang of ghosts, and lead you on a callous, lonely walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The star of this album, however, is the harp. The heavy momentum on “Water (Forgetting the Past),” “Vanishing (Remaining),” and “Amnesia (A Victor’s History)” isn’t disrupted by the haunting harmonica that calls you home with a totem’s tongue; instead they work together in some kind of brazen, taunting harmony. The backwoods brass and cowboy harmonica of “Dust (Erasing the Future),” the album’s commandeering ballad, is for outlaws only, and captures the spirit of wide open, starry nights and circling, hungry vultures. Again, the dichotomy of hope and desperation abounds. You don’t get the same old epic, aural sound scape with SYA that you do with other bands of their ilk. What you get instead is the distinct, suffocating, and palpable feeling that the end is near. Deep, awesome stuff.

Listen to “Vanishing (Remaining)” from The Name of the Snake!

Tres Brujas

The Sword
Warp Riders

First ever concept album from Texan metal monsters The Sword, which, as you might guess from the cover, draws its cosmic inspiration from old bargain bin sci-fi novels and creased issues of Heavy Metal magazine. Warp Riders, then, is a conscious thematic shift for the band, which has set its lyrical sights this time on the great beyond, tackling planetary forces of good and evil instead of the more earthly doom and gloom of battle axes and black magic. The narrative, in brief, is about Ereth, an archer who has been banished from his tribe on the planet Acheron, which is stuck in a tidal lock, meaning that half of it is shrouded in darkness while the other half is burnt by the heat of three different suns. Got it? Good. Warp Riders is also a bit of a musical departure for The Sword as well, who have surround their space-world narrative with some freak-fried, 70s-infused boogie doom, and the whole thing kind of sounds like Witchcraft and Year Long Disaster gigging biker bars on Mars. Dig the thick, red rock n’ roll on “Tres Brujas,” “Lawless Lands,” “Night City,” and “(The Night the Sky Cried) Tears of Fire” for the best examples. But listen, the faithful needn’t worry because The Sword haven’t completely abandoned their head-banging aesthetics; they’ve just fused some asteroid-splitting riffs with their old pro stoner thrashing for a massively dope ride through the outermost limits. And it really is some awesome stuff.

Listen to “Night City” from Warp Riders!

Dax Riggs
Say Goodnight to the World

I’m not going to say that Dax Riggs (former Acid Bath and Deadboy & The Elephantmen front man) is the best singer/songwriter in America because, well, I can’t actually prove a statement like that, but he’s awfully fucking good, and I can’t think of too many people who come close to touching his evil, dark, misanthropic folk rock. As experienced on 2007′s We Sing of Only Blood or Love, the Louisiana musician’s solo outputs contain all the folly and misery of suffering, loneliness, torment, and death — meaning they’re completely and utterly human — and Say Goodnight to the World once again represents our most dire straits via rolling graveyard shuffles (“Say Goodnight to the World,” “I Hear Satan,” “Sleeping With the Witch”), fuzzy rockers (“Gravedirt on My Blue Suede Shoes,” “No One Will Be a Stranger,” “Let Me Be Your Cigarette”), and swampy, haunting dirges (“You Were Born to Be My Gallows,” “Like Moonlight,” “See You All in Hell or New Orleans”). Of course, it’s his babbling, bourbon-basted, bayou tongue that really puts the hoodoo in his musical voodoo, like he’s channeling his inner dead Elvis with a mouth full of curses and bats, which is why his cover of “Heartbreak Hotel” is one spooky, bad-ass moment. Do yourself a favour and get into Dax Riggs if you haven’t already.

Listen to “You Were Born to Be My Gallows” from Say Goodnight to the World!