Music, movies, comics, design, interviews and reviews
8 Lines or Less covers albums from small, often regional bands with the occasional major release thrown in. The idea is to give coverage to artists self-releasing great, under-appreciated and under-covered albums. If you’ve got a band and you’ve been grinding away at getting coverage, drop us a line and we’ll check out your stuff. [...]
After a few false starts and a few changes in personnel, Western Medicine’s (who we’ve covered here and here) debut EP In Transit is finally here. There’s a very mournful confidence that permeates the album, even on some of the more upbeat rockers, though not to the point of being oppressive. Even though the album [...]
Black God’s second studio album Two is a simple, effective, stripped down battle that doesn’t stop until the last note rings out. Other than a little finger play through the intros and melodic outros, the tracks are as straight-forward as can be, pulsing with an energy that truly adds to the raw urgency of Rob [...]
P.S. “When we were kids we never felt so young, take me to a hazy Sunday morning,” is one of the most dumb, vapid, clichéd lines delivered with a straight face I have ever heard. New kind of heavy, my ass.
If there’s one word that describes Aaron Turner’s musical output, it’d have to be “indulgent.” There’s no way to meet him on his projects in any way other than completely on his terms and those terms frequently dictate that you endure one drawn out riff or sample-laden noise track after another. ISIS went this direction [...]
In the world of short film, “proof of concept” shorts that filmmakers create in the hopes of gaining enough interest in their project to attract funding for a feature-length version are fairly common. They come in all types of forms: faux trailers are fairly popular, and sometimes a filmmaker will create a “highlight reel” of [...]
On the heels of years of inactivity within the Pentagram camp (documented in the recent “Last Days Here” documentary), singer Bobby Liebling got clean, got his shit together, assembled a new lineup and – for the first time in the band’s almost four decade history – was able to get some nationwide touring under his [...]
John Cage loved sounds just as they are — he didn’t want a sound to pretend to be a bucket. He associated himself with Kant. He let a black cat love-bite at his hand. He articulated the insight that Schopenhauer tripped over (undercutting his own argument by engaging in the Critic’s perviest fetish of constructing [...]
Turbonegro has an exhausting history and rather than pull a “Pitchfork reviews El-P,” here’s a brief catch-up: A billion singers. A billion drummers. Deathpunk giving way to glampunk. Heroin. Rehab. Heroin again. Ass rockets. Cancer. Erections. TV theme show songs. Steadily declining returns on each successive album. Videogame soundtracks. Hiatus. Now that the band is [...]
Just as William James emphasized the importance of experientiality to the mystic in Varieties of Religious Experience, I’ve come to believe that some music should be referred to as ‘experiential’ (is that taken?) or ‘suchness’ rather than by a name that attempts to describe the characteristics of the music, i.e. ‘drone,’ ‘ambient,’ ‘noise.’ The latter [...]
