all the noise that's fit to blog
Before a screening of Pulp Fiction at the Hollywood Forever cemetery in Los Angeles, Rancid's Tim Armstrong led a solid Ramones tribute band through a half hour of classics, culminating in a finale of tunes with Billy Idol leading the way.
Billed as The Cretin Commandos, Armstrong and the crew, which included CJ Ramone on a few tunes, blasted through 14 Ramones or Ramones-adjacent covers in a blistering 29 minutes.
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PJ Harvey gave fans at the Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona, Spain, a pleasant surprise when she "live debuted" "Black Hearted Love," a song she had only performed once before for a special from Abbey Road Studios in 2009.
Technically that 2009 performance was the the live debut, but this weekend was the first time she played it in front of a paying audience, many of whom might not have heard it before at all because the fest was headlined by Lana Del Rey, Pulp, and SZA.
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Slash's new blues album Orgy of the Damned, is mighty good.
No, the top-hat-wearing Guns N' Roses guitar hero didn't write a bunch of bluesy tunes as a canvas to shred over, instead, he invited a wide variety of stars to help him celebrate some of the best blues numbers out there.
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Who would have guessed the Outloud music festival at West Hollywood Pride would provide so many live debuts?
Yesterday we told you about Kesha kicking off her set on Friday with a brand spanking new song called "Freedom."
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Thom Yorke is a bit of a man of mystery.
This is a statement he put out recently about a forthcoming tour, his first since 2019: "In the autumn in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and Japan I will be alone on stage trying a new kind of solo show thing playing versions of the songs I have written from my recent and not so recent past."
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Kesha has gone through a lot and Friday night she was completely free - an appropriate feeling for one of the headliners at the West Hollywood Pride Festival.
The singer has famously been battling one of her former producers and his record label. Earlier this year Kesha told V Magazine about the settlement both sides agreed upon.
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Pixies kicked off their North American tour last week in South Carolina with an audience friendly set of familiar favorites from their groundbreaking albums of the late-'80s and '90s.
Fresh off the heels of a European Tour where they played both 1990's Bossanova and 1991'sTrompe le Monde in their entirety, the quartet from Boston seem to be happy giving the Americans more of a greatest hits show.
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When Billy Corgan puts it out in the world that The Smashing Pumpkins is looking for a new guitarist, there's going to be a ton of virtuosos tossing their flying V's into the ring.
But who knew 10,000 would-be rockers would want a taste of standing in the shadows of the bald Chicagoan? And who would have guessed the winner would be an Instagram mainstay who slides into frame and shreds for a minute while making funny faces?
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Despite coming out of the Grunge Era, Pearl Jam sure know how to instill both the elements of punk rock with those of how the Grateful Dead used to approach shows.
They're punk not in sound or style, but ethos. Many of the traditional ways of doing a rock tour are often thrown out the window with the Seattle veterans hit the road. One of them is: you have no idea what they're going to play.
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When James Hetfield introduced "Inamorata" at the Olympiastadion in Munich, Germany last Sunday he made it sound like there was something wrong with the 11-minute rocker.
"This next song, we have never, ever played live before," the 60-year-old singer/shredder said to the 75,000 in attendance.
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The mid-1980s were a weird time for rockers torn between diving into the softer synthesizer sound or doubling down on the harder guitars. No band struggled more with that fork in the road than Styx who started of as a rock group for the boys but slowly turned into a female favorite.
And at its heart was the tug-of-war over "Mr. Roboto," the lead single of the ambitious Kilroy Was Here concept album that broke the band up twice. Once in the early '80s and then again in the early '90s.
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When Jane's Addiction's classic lineup reunited last week for the first time since 2010, it was the start of more good news for fans of the Los Angeles band.
Thanks to the return of guitarist Dave Navarro (who had been battling Long Covid), alongside singer Perry Farrell, drummer Stephen Perkins, and bassist Eric Avery, Jane's was set to reveal even better news: they will go on tour alongside Love and Rockets, a group they opened up for in the 1980s.
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