TO ROCK YOUR FACE OFF, AGAIN   I don't do nostalgia. If you're not creating new music, you're irrelevant, dead to me. Baltimore's own Kix has risen from the dead as of late 2013, when they recorded their fifth album with the same lineup (one key original founding member excepted). Rock Your Face Off was perhaps too positively reviewed here in the excitement after its release. But any subsequent reassessment is obviated and beside the point as the band prepares to release Can't Stop The Show: The Return Of Kix, a deluxe live and behind the scenes and in the studio making of multi media rockumentary. Apparently they’re breaking their collective arm patting themselves on the back after three years. To that I say, good for them. Former bassist/songwriter/control freakin' Svengali Donnie Purnell dominated the band for nearly two decades. How satisfying must it have been for Kix to say kiss my ass, we can do it without you, nineteen years later no less. All we have to do is rep... » Click here for the full story.

 Damn Right, I Got the Blues   2 paraphrase The Rock, finally! the Blues has come back to Ocean City! Last month, Lower Case Blues had half of their tools of the trade purloined by some anti music lower life form, at least affording me the impetus and excuse for writing a long delayed (by a year no less...my bad) article about their fine fourth album. Last week they recovered at least one guitar and proceeded to return triumphantly to M.R. Ducks downtown on de bay. So with regard to underrepresented lo ere long these past couple column years, to continue my attempt to reconcile my oversight and show I’m contrite,  here's an apposite straight review of the proceedings. Well, the first half of it anyway ... second sets being a, ahem, challenge for me. As a prefatory note about the venue, it don't get no better than a waterfront concert: this is why we live here, fellow locals. Blues on the bay, baby. As the sun sets, yet. Said Blues began promptly at five with... » Click here for the full story.

  Oye - te quiero, tequila. All apologies to Irish whiskey, but the best booze in the world is the sweet golden agave nectar. The best excuse to indulge es Viernes, Dieciseis De Septiembre: Dia De La Independencia. And I'll go as far as to declare Mexican cerveza the best beer in the world - second only to Ireland's best (Guinness, Murphy's, Smithwicks). Corona and Sol excepted as they’re instaskunked in the clear bottles - caveat emptor. I prefer Dos Equis, indeed. And Negra Modello. Stay thirsty mis amigos.  It's also the best excuse to allow a non local band to usurp this space. Tijuana's own Los Shadows may not have purloined, speaking of usurpation, White Reaper's Band Of The Year regnancy last year, but had I been cognizant of their six song debut, recorded that August, they would have at least been toppermost of the poppermost for my Cinco De Mayo fiesta. Such as it is, the new disqué de Shadows is fresh as of June. It's called Midnight Climax and features... » Click here for the full story.

    Cognitive dissonance. Ambivalence. Polarization. That's how one feels about Rod Stewart: shame, that. As Morrissey sang, we hate it when our friends become successful. But when you go from promising young rocknsoul singer with a proto metal band that Led Zeppelin stole more from than they did Willie Dixon, to the best Rolling Stones band not actually named The Rolling Stones, to...lounge lizard lite? Engelbert Humperdinck? Mel Torme, The Velvet Fog? But then he'll go and let the latent rocker we all know is screaming for vengeance out to play with old mates. Or release a piece of rocknroll found on the street like "Finest Woman That I’ve Ever Known" just a couple years ago. Hell, even after his Atlantic Crossing to Hollywood in 1975 - after Faces fell, well, on their faces - considered his official "sellout" - he made his heaviest hard Stones rock with Carmine Appice's heavy hands on plodding sub Bonham drums and "Hot Legs", influenced... » Click here for the full story.

In 1967 the most famous drugs bust in musical history went down ("set up like a bowling pin"- The Grateful Dead, "Truckin" (1970)) at Keith Richards' estate. As a tribute to/support for The Rolling Stones, The Who immediately (understatement: the single was recorded and released THAT WEEK) covered "The Last Time" and "Under My Thumb" to keep one's mind on the group in their time of trouble (what a botheration, as the Jamaicans said). This week, the Delaware power trio Lower Case Blues were pillaged plundered and purloined of crucial tools of the trade, specifically a bass, pedalboard, snare and cymbals. As a columnist whose ostensible raison d'être is the local scene, I have done LCB a disservice, not damning them with faint praise but with little praise: I've been waiting for a weekday southern show (south of Rehoboth anyway) to cover. Well, their fourth album has been out over a year and I'm still waiting. So it's high time I found my O... » Click here for the full story.

Sing a Sandy Song   ...with apologies to Sly Stone. Sure, the 2nd Street Jesus Freak has been building them for over two decades in front of the Plim Plaza. But for sand sculpture freaks looking for more than historically inaccurate (Christ couldn’t possibly have looked like that, as science proved - as did Time magazine, among others, did with its cover portrait - years ago, but myopic religious fanaticism has no regard for science or progress in general) churchical/biblical depictions, the third annual OC Sandfest, beginning Monday and culminating in the awards ceremony at the grandstand downtown Thursday at noon, demands a daily walkabout.  Here's your soundtrack as you perambulate: eight sand in your suit songs for the eighth month. Crucially crucial: The Beach Boys have at least a dozen lyrics in their catalogue referencing sand (said Captain Obvious). So they'll be represented by *"Brian Wilson" - Brian Wilson (2000) Barenaked Ladies wrote thi... » Click here for the full story.

First things first. If you're reading this before mid afternoon Friday, log off your electronic device post haste - like, yesterday - and get thee behind me to Sunset (Avenue, and Grill). There’s still hope for you. Microwave Dave And The Nukes have one more gig to go before they go back to 'bama. If you missed this deadline - well, you missed it and are hopeless.  This blues ("blues and blues byproducts") trio reliably return to the aforementioned venue and sister station Micky Fins annually during White Marlin Open week. Which is curious given that they are competing with the biggest event of the OC summer season but I suppose that’s the point, to get us away from the scales and into these two restaurants. One of which conveniently suspended their normally good deal happy hour (half price!) this week, and the other's specials end when the band begins. How nice. Dave and his two mates played every day for six days - for four hours straight (half hour inte... » Click here for the full story.

 GET READY 2 DO DE ROCKSTEADY   "When first I heard Rock steady/thrilled me to the bone/when I talk of rock steady/you need a riddim of your own/Rock steady easy/steady rock easy" -Bob Marley, 1968   This week's continuing 1966 series continues with Jamaica's morph from ska into rock steady as Saturday is Jamaican Independence Day from British colonialism. Not that that improved living conditions in the poor impoverished third world country - indeed it would get much worse in the mid seventies, crime wise, before it would get better.  Still, signature ska collective The Skatalites skanked out "Independent Anniversary Ska" in commemoration of the occasion and their last single. Among the vocal melody makers of nascent reggae that they backed in 62-65 were The Wailers.  A sea change was in the Caribbean air as early as December 1965 and Bob's "I'm Gon Put It On", with its slower, if not slow, still jaunty, riddim. Emphasis on... » Click here for the full story.

Appetite For Destruction is thirty. Use Your Illusion is twenty-five. It's not illusive - they really were that damn good. For five years, the hype was justified: this was the best rock and roll band in the world. So to complement my '66 series, when the former band to claim that regnant title, The Rolling Stones, made the first of their best recordings, I'll Locomotive to '86 and '91 and the next band to be worthy of another superlative: most dangerous rock and roll band in the world. BEATING A DEAD HORSE A couple years after another iconic hard rock/heavy metal (depending on who you ask; the late Lemmy, RIP,  would have just called it rocknroll) legend, Black Sabbath, perpetrated a fraud by reuniting with all the attendant fanfare, pomp and circumstance but without Bill Ward, GunsnRoses begins the cliched long awaited "reunion" tour that isn't. Oh - and this comes as AC/DC concludes their tour featuring none other than Axl Rose on Brian's Johnson and in his place i... » Click here for the full story.

ANTHEM was the title of philosopher Ayn Rand's second major work. The dystopian futuristic 1937 novella's theme was individualism versus collectivism (society) as Rand had only  defected from communist Russia a dozen years earlier and dedicated her life to denouncing that poisonous altruism.  Flash forward fifteen years to the birth of similarly ahead of his time (percussion wise; I've been attempting - and failing - to not just duplicate, but comprehend his astonishing fills... hell, riddims!) Rush drummer/lyricist Neil Peart. Brilliant from birth, obviously, a childhood weaned on Rand begat lyrics like "keep on looking forward no use looking round...live for yourself, there's noone else quite worth living for/begging hands and bleeding hearts will only cry out for more/we marvel after those who sought the wonders of the world". The politics of individuality, so relevant in this politically charged era.  Peart goes on to credit Rand live and direct in the... » Click here for the full story.