Lars Gotrich

In whatever wave of emo we're experiencing now, we've reached a fever pitch of bands that rely too heavily on the '90s sound — think Mineral, American Football, Braid — that preceded them. It's instinctual to start from our mentors, but important to move forward. That can be ...

Filmmaker Terrence Malick knows light. In Days Of Heaven, think of the silhouettes shot against waves of grain during the magic hour between dusk and sunset. Or when the young boys in The Tree Of Life watch their own long shadows walk on an empty street. These are spaces where ...

This is the mash-up of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers you never knew you wanted. And, yes, you want it.

A sequel of sorts to director Pete Binswanger's channel-surfing nightmare for "Wojtek," the video for Roomrunner's bummer noise-punk anthem "Karn" is set after ...

Chris Weisman's songs shouldn't work. Or, at the very least, the massive volume and musical limits the Battleboro, Vt., singer places on his songs shouldn't work. Stretching his output over cassettes, split releases, CDs with long track lists and even an 88-song YouTube album, Weisman must have ...

It's only fitting that one of NPR Music's favorite songs of 2014 gets a video that reflects Cayetana's inherent badassery. For the freewheeling "Scott Get The Van, I'm Moving," director Adam Peditto gives the Philly punk band a beautifully shot slow-mo treatment in an abandoned building, as Cayetana ...

When we last left Six Organs Of Admittance, band mastermind Ben Chasny had recruited his old pals in Comets On Fire to make 2012's Ascent, the blown-out, hard-chooglin' psych-rock record nerds like me had been waiting for since Comets On Fire went on hiatus in 2008. Chasny ...

Makthaverskan, the Swedish post-punk band with a horns-up-worthy name that loosely translates to "powerful woman," is adept at mixing sweetness with spit. Where 2013's striking album Makthaverskan II gave the genre a kick in the teeth with searing honesty about sick hearts and scummy ex-lovers, in ...

On the outdoor stage at last year's Maryland Deathfest, Dorthia Cottrell was a vocal force you couldn't ignore, as she howled over Windhand's oppressive doom-metal riffs. But as much as Cottrell can match and destroy that volume — just listen to last year's guest vocals with Bastard Sapling ...

Watch just about any video where Mylets' Henry Kohen is performing his guitar-looping one-man-band wizardry live, and it's like that one scene in Back To The Future III when Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen shoots at the floor, yells "dance!" and Marty McFly hops around ...

Rock 'n' roll can be a lot of things — dangerous, sexy, stupid — but Pile's rock 'n' roll is deranged. The Boston band delights in riffs that pop wheelies off the side of cliffs, the careening croon and yelp of Rick Maguire, and a pummeling punk rhythm section that ...

Props to a metal band that fully acknowledges its lineage: Philadelphia's Crypt Sermon knows it couldn't exist without Candlemass, Solitude Aeturnus and Dio-era Black Sabbath. On its debut album, Out Of The Garden, the band quickly gets into the business of making majestic doom metal that honors its forebears. ...

Nostalgia is a polar bear in the wild — warm and fuzzy from a distance, terrifying once the reality of its power confronts you. In her music as Ô Paon and in her graphic novels, the Anacortes, Wash.-based Geneviève Castrée often writes about the things that haunt her: violence, ...

When Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker harmonize, it's like a lightning bolt to the gut. As Girlpool, the two keep the instrumentation spare — just an electric guitar and bass — while infusing their songs with a striking confidence that knows we're all failures, or at least trying not to ...

Sometimes being a punk band means three fast power chords, and everyone's happy because three fast power chords are fundamentals of rock 'n' roll fun. Sometimes being a punk band means evolving from three fast power chords and hoping fans come along for a ride that might get darker and ...

Sometimes you don't know that you've missed something, like an old friend or a recipe tucked away in a cookbook, until it reappears just when it's needed. In August, I went to see Unwed Sailor's set in Washington, D.C., partly out of nostalgia. I came away not only fortified by ...

Monotonic chants, 8-bit four-on-the-floor, MIDI strings... Get your keyboards at the ready, Metal Internet: It's "Quetzalcoatl" from Liturgy's third album, The Ark Work.

Maybe the hints were there all along. After spending years as metal's whipping boy for reasons both ideological and aesthetic, the self-proclaimed "transcendental black metal" ...

There's a good chance that the members of Adventures were still in elementary school when the '90s ended — which is cool, because Supersonic Home culls from an emo and alt-rock era whose output feels eternal. It's another side to three-quarters of the metallic hardcore band Code Orange (they ...

Some noise freaks will have you believe that if the music doesn't kill you, it's not extreme enough. Since 2000, the Brooklyn band Zs and its rotating cast could sometimes be accused of that mentality, as they've looked to the caustic examples of '60s free jazz, '80s No Wave ...

At the center of Mind Over Mirrors' sound lies the Indian pedal harmonium, an instrument that elicits a piercing tone; it's at once devotional and alarming in its presence and volume. Jaime Fennelly typically surrounds these song-driven drones with tape loops and synthesizers, and on The Voice Calling, he's joined ...

It's been six years since Blacklisted's No One Deserves To Be Here More Than Me, a gritty hardcore record that outwardly plays with melody, noise and lunging tempos that felt truer to Soundgarden or Nirvana's Bleach than anything else. Now comes When People Grow, People Go, a record ...