Lars Gotrich

Doom is as doom does. No matter how many sub-sub genre tags you put on it — blackened, atmospheric, sludge, bedazzled (okay, I made that up, but what if) — all descend from Black Sabbath. But you knew that. Doom thrives on repetition, in both its riffs and its ...

In the last seconds of the string-laden, heavy-burdened "World," the opening track from Loud City Song, everything drops out except for a voice that sings with hopeless deflation, "How can I escape you?" Julia Holter has always had a flair for not only drama, but also the dramatic. She's ...

We forget to listen closer, look closer. As a big-picture kind of guy, I do that myself, and that means missing details that make day-to-day life more vivid. Listening to High Aura'd, it's apparent that creator John Kolodij hears life with great clarity. Last year's Sanguine Features was ...

Vattnet Viskar's self-titled 2012 EP blazed through atmospheric, doom-ridden black metal with authority; it had promise for a style that's been mined endlessly in recent years. But after a decade of lesser disciples of the Neurosis and Isis clans applying melodically driven bass lines and sudden crescendos ...

There's a lot to absorb in the 100 minutes that make up Hubardo, an ambitious concept album about a meteor that falls to earth and transforms a lonely poet. Longtime fans of Kayo Dot can hear bits and pieces of the avant-metal band's decade of sonic transgression weave in and ...

Try as I might, I could never skateboard. It's as if gravity didn't know what to make of my body and would send me flying face-first into the concrete at every opportunity. That never stopped me from watching skate videos on late-night cable-access TV — pinhole cameras, bloody wipeouts and ...

Jucifer is an odd bird among the droning doom crowd: It's likely to splinter speakers one minute, yet lull you into a false sense of security with a folksy pop song the next. But live, Jucifer is a total body experience — a non-stop, 45-minute HULK OUT of ...

Walking into his tiny studio between the living room and kitchen of his family's apartment late one night last July, Chris Schlarb was like a giddy little kid. Grinning ear to ear, he pulled up an unmixed cover of the lesser-known Beach Boys song "'Til I Die" on ...

There are just too many quotable quotables from Speedy Ortiz's debut album, so let's cut to the raison d'être from "Tiger Tank": "My mouth is a factory for every toxic part of speech I spew."

Major Arcana, out July 9, is a lot of things: awkward, vulnerable, heavy, hilarious. ...

Chelsea Wolfe has a surreal voice that cuts through her foggy, soulful, often haunting rock and folk music. There's a thorny vision of yearning, heartbreak and death in Wolfe's songs that's striking, yet always brings us back to what makes these bleak themes so appealing, even beautiful. When I ...

Slow and steady wins the race, but sometimes, as in life, you need a moody sidekick to get you through it. (Or maybe that's just Daria.) Over the course of three mid-tempo albums, True Widow's stoner-rock and shoegaze mix (dubbed "stonegaze," of course) trudges with back-breaking heft. ...

Guys, did you hear? The '90s are back! By all means, don't let go — you've got the music in you — but as the nostalgia gap gets shorter every year, there's a fine line between homage and theft. That's why recent rock bands like Milk Music,

Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 film Kwaidan drifts around your brain like a mist of evaporated blood. It's a cinematic retelling of four Japanese ghost stories — some outlandish and frightening from the outset, but mostly reeled in by suspense that comes from what the director once called "the juxtaposition between man's ...

If the wrath of heaven sounds anything like Locrian, then archangel Michael has been digging into the prog-rock bin lately. The loosely Chicago-based trio has always had grand ambition, dissolving and rebuilding the darker sounds of ambient, noise and metal on its own and in several collaborations (Mammifer, Christoph ...

Autopsy just wants to make nasty death metal, okay? No technical this, no frip-frappity-do that, and by the re-animated corpses of hellbound souls, ain't nothing going to change about it. From the late '80s to the mid-'90s, the Bay Area band was an anomaly among speed demons: a chaotic horde ...

If you've ever passed by the funk and jazz-lite dollar bin at the record store, Stephen Bruner kindly asks that you pause to revel in the pastel colors and unfettered joy. The virtuosic bassist and singer comes from a diverse pedigree: a boy band, a stint in Suicidal Tendencies and, ...

Remember the slow-moving, ridiculously armed ED-209 in the first RoboCop movie? The poor thing couldn't walk down a stairwell, but boy, could that machine leave a bloody mess. Author & Punisher does much the same, for both the ears and whatever's left of the body.

Mechanical engineer and ...

Sadie Dupuis: rock 'n' roll camp counselor, poet, songwriter, snack enthusiast. If you don't already want to be her best friend based on that description, Dupuis' solo-moniker-turned-band Speedy Ortiz captures the nonsensical wit of Stephen Malkmus, but is simultaneously ballsier and more self-deprecating. Also like Pavement, Speedy Ortiz ...

From its name onward, Glenn Jones' My Garden State sets a personal tone. The album was written in the northern New Jersey house where the American Primitive-style guitarist and banjo player grew up with his family. When his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's some years back, he and his ...

Slayer inspires the kind of rabid fandom that causes short yet intimidating bald men to yell SLAAAAYYEEERRR while pounding cheap beer, while in lines for shows, while in line for groceries. Before we could tattoo its logo on our arms, we took Sharpies to our notebooks and lockers, pledging our ...