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March 31, 2008 | Music News
March 31, 2008 | Music News
March 28, 2008 | Columns
There are so many things about this place I love without fully understanding why I love them. Read more
March 28, 2008 | Music News
March 27, 2008 | Music News
March 27, 2008 | Columns
March 27, 2008 | Art
Australia’s Glebe Island Bridge elicited a similar response in budding sound artist Jodi Rose. “When I was at art school in ’95, I would drive by the Glebe Island Bridge (Anzac Bridge) every day and it just looked like a giant harp to me.”
March 26, 2008 | Music News
March 26, 2008 | Columns
March 25, 2008 | Movies
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ALARM Magazine #30 |
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…So many bands, so little time. Where else can you enjoy so many amazing bands while agonizing about missing so many other equally awesome shows at the same time? Thankfully since many of the performers played as many as ten shows throughout the five days of the festival- they were sometimes more impossible to miss than not. 
ALARM threw a party in celebration of Dub Trio’s latest record Another Sound is Dying (Ipecac, vinyl on ROIR) at The Subterranean in Chicago on February 27. Sure, it was cold outside, but a night of dub and rock combined with generous specials from Red Stripe let concertgoers imagine they were far, far away. 
On Wednesday, as I watched Joey Chestnut get a world record for most hot dogs and buns eaten in twelve minutes, I thought about how to assess my identity as an American. It is a confusing thing for me.
The release of last years Build A Nation (Megaforce), marked the 30th anniversary of rasta rockers, Bad Brains. Produced by Adam Yauch (MCA of the Beastie Boys), Build A Nation satisfied the restless ears of aging punks and impressionable youth worldwide. The album even found its way on 
Good things come in threes- such as The Raveonettes’ new record, Lust Lust Lust. When I talked to Sune Rose Wagner of the Raveonettes in December, he told me how appealing a three-piece band looks on stage. He wasn’t kidding- as the new bare-bones approach to the stage was only one of the aesthetic pleasures that the Danish duo brought to Chicago’s Double Door last Tuesday. 
Since the 1960s, we’ve had a music filter with the major-label system. Now technology is putting that system to the test by giving artists and consumers new choices. But are these choices at the expense of an entire industry that has supported tens of thousands for over seven decades? 
When the Golden Gate was built, the San Francisco Chronicle called it a thirty-five-million-dollar steel harp. Its chief engineer, Joseph B. Strauss, probably didn’t mind. In fact, he seemed to think so too, writing, “As harps for the winds of heaven / my weblike cables are spun.”
Stephin Merritt is a quirky and frighteningly prolific singer, songwriter, and multitalented musician whose multiple projects include solo work, four bands (The Magnetic Fields, Future Bible Heroes, The Gothic Archies, and the Sixths), musical theater productions, and film scores. Merritt has recorded a number of songs and albums as a solo artist (including a variation on the classic children’s song “The Wheels on the Bus,” for a recent Volvo commercial), but he is best known for his work with The Magnetic Fields, the group he founded in 1989 while living in Boston. Though the band’s lineup has changed over the years, Merritt has always retained the role of primary composer, lyricist, and arranger. 
…the concrete floor—seemingly so solid and utterly inviolable—begins to vibrate in a steady, slow pulse. You feel it in your feet and then in your bones. You can’t hear anything but Studio One horns and overloud club conversation in this room, but you can definitely sense it: something serious is going on in a world down below, and Surya Dub—a monthly club night that celebrates “global dubwize vibes and dread bass culture”—is officially on. 
Rock the Bells is a funny and quite often frightening account of concert promoter Chang Weisberg’s attempt to reunite all nine original members of the Wu-Tang Clan for the 2005 “Rock the Bells” hip hop festival—a show that would be Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s last before his death less than six months later. It’s a skillfully paced doc that slowly builds to an almost-harrowing conclusion as the promoters and fans wait for the group’s troubled wildcard, ODB, to complete the reunion. “It’s planning a wedding, and you hope the groom shows up,” Weisberg comments, but he is seriously understating the situation.