Culture & Interests
Made Better in Japan
For decades, Japan simply imported the wares of foreign cultures, but recession has led to invention. The country has begun creating the finest American denim, French cuisine and Italian espresso in the world. Now is the time to visit.
Album of the Week: The Soft Moon
The dead-of-night eeriness of the Soft Moon’s singles suggested Luis Vasquez was the dark horse in the Captured Tracks stable, and this self-titled full-length confirms it.
The Insider’s Outsider: Dries Van Noten
Dries Van Noten has built a booming business much to the envy of the fashion industry. How an idiosyncratic Belgian designer with particular notions about the way men and women should dress is quietly beating the big corporate conglomerates at their own game.
Book of the Month: Pygmy
In his new novel, Pygmy, Palahniuk is better at celebrating the freaks than cutting down the squares. It’s the kind of story the author has made a career out of; intermittently funny, absurdly scatological, and more than a little hollow.
Album of the Week: Accelerator
Indebted to the Stones and astoundingly messy, but that’s why Accelerator rocks like a demon, running over everything in sight.
Album of the Week: Over the Edge
Despite the fusion of punk and pop, the record hardly mirrors the bands that would later be called punk-pop. There’s just too much blood and sweat, and there’s too much tightly wound tension released.
Album of the Week: Sleep Forever
Tarnishing sunny melodies with a skuzzy recording style and lots and lots of feedback…
Album of the Week: Popular Favorites
Listen all you ladies/And you little girls too/Got a brand new dance/Put your arms in the air/Move your shoulders…let ‘em shake/Do the milkshake.
Book of the Month: Government Issue
Histoire and Collections has earned a reputation for producing the finest, incredibly detailed and sumptuously illustrated books. All the uniforms, insignia, badges, weapons and equipment of the ETO are described in detail and depicted in both photographs and full color graphics.
Album of the Week: Paralyzed
Although the dirgey Sabbath grind of Witch’s debut release is retained here, there’s also a newfound amphetamine rush to this material, the band drawing more explicitly on some of its punk and hardcore roots.
Album of the Week: First Daze Here
Ever wonder how it felt for blues historians to uncover the lost 78s containing Robert Johnson’s timeless Depression-era recordings? Well, if there’s a heavy metal equivalent to this experience, then First Daze Here may well be it.
Album of the Week: Witchcult Today
Often referred to as the “heaviest band in the universe,” England’s Electric Wizard have consistently redefined the preconceived thresholds of a detuned guitar chord with their peerless doom metal achievements.
Album of the Week: Black Metal
Influenced by the heavy intensity of Motörhead and the visual flash of Kiss, Venom’s dark and blistering sound and macabre and proudly satanic image gave the genre its name with the release of their 1982 sophomore LP, Black Metal.
Book of the Month: Indigo
Indigo has been the world’s most valued dyestuff for almost five millennia. This book covers all aspects of it in detail: historical, commercial and economic; it’s various uses in textiles and art; and its many sociological, medicinal, folkloric connotations.
Album of the Week: Entertainment!
Subversive records of any ilk don’t get any stronger, influential, or exciting than this.
Album of the Week: Rembrandt Pussyhorse
Everything seems to start almost normally on Pussyhorse with “Creep in the Cellar,” even with the rather gone violin line…then again, Haynes is talking about the creep in question doing things like taking off his skin.
Album of the Week: Surfer Rosa
One of the most compulsively listenable college rock albums of the ’80s, the Pixies’ 1988 full-length debut Surfer Rosa fulfilled the promise of Come on Pilgrim and added a muscular edge that made their harshest moments seem even more menacing and perverse.
Album of the Week: Fire of Love
The Gun Club’s debut is the watermark for all post-punk roots music. This features the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s swamped-out brand of roiling rock, swaggerific hell-bound blues, and gothic country.
Book of the Month: A Timeless Guide to Fashion
If a 360-page guidebook to pajamas, English suits, and walking canes is not your idea of beach reading, stop right here. But if men’s-wear minutiae tickle your fancy, slip into the new, second edition of Bernhard Roetzel’s Gentleman: A Timeless Guide to Fashion.
Album of the Week: Girls in the Garage
It was the logical extension of two of the most important and enduring pop music tributaries of the 1960s — the girl group sound and the garage band explosion, respectively — but the distaff garage rock scene has earned precious little documentation on record or in history books over the years.
Album of the Week: One Man Against the World
This is a travelin’ album – by rail, by wheel, by wood, and coal. No jet engines here, only industrial sweat and steel. Southern blues stripped to the bare essentials, John Schooley & His One Man Band multitasks like a train-jumper circa 1938. Playing all the instruments on the album save cello and mandolin, Schooley grinds it out just the same live…
Album of the Week: Slinky! The Epic Sessions, ’58-’61
Link Wray may never get into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but his contribution to the language of rockin’ guitar would still be a major one, even if he had never walked into another studio after cutting “Rumble.” Quite simply, Link Wray invented the power chord…
Album of the Week: L.A.M.F.
Borrowing inspiration from his old band, the New York Dolls, along with Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, the Ramones, and heroin, Thunders & the Heartbreakers’ junkie antics places L.A.M.F. favorably alongside other New York punk bands from the late ’70s.
Book of the Month: Savage Beauty
Arguably the most influential, imaginative, and provocative designer of his generation, Alexander McQueen both challenged and expanded fashion conventions to express ideas about race, class, sexuality, religion, and the environment.