Hey Kids:
I always enjoyed Katt Williams. His Comedy Central specials were a good time and I guess have spawned a bunch of film work for him. Or maybe vice versa?
I met Whitmore at Twangfest in St. Louis a couple of years ago. I ended up talking with him and the guys from Backyard Tire Fire while they soundchecked and took solace in that fact that even if their bands ended up sucking that night, they sure seemed to be good people. During our chat, William mentioned that he lived in a shack in Iowa without heat or running water, but so genuinely that it didn't seem to be just dropped to impress. He played an early set later that night to a real Hank III kind of crowd ranging from trainhopper crust kids to grey-haired purists, all of whom seemed to enjoy a drink.
Whouda thought, Kurious is back! You should remember I'm Kurious and Mansion And A Yacht from back in the day, or if you were a Purchase kid from the early 90s maybe you saw him at parties. Either way, he was a good guy to drink a 40oz with and had some fun tunes, a lot of which were produced by the mighty Beatnuts. The Beatnuts pop up behind the boards here, as do VIC and Dame Grease. If you're into such things (and I am) MF Doom and MC Serch pop up on the old school compliant Benetton, too. Pick up Kurious Jorge's II from Amalgam Digital on 3/24 here. Track listing is below. Crate diggers can rest assured that there will be hard copies as well. You can check out the first single Back From Up Under (feat. Max B) here.
First off, all props are due to the mighty Unkut.com for the heads up that this even exists.
For the uninitiated, La Coka Nostra is a supergroup of sorts, featuring the gents from House Of Pain, along with Ill Bill from Non-Phixion, Slaine from the criminally underrated Special Teams and some guy named Big Left. Of course, there are also guest spots from Cypress Hill, Psycho Realm and (ahem) Danny Diablo. I can't say that I'm really feeling Brand Name Dope, though. I always liked HOP, even as late as Truth Crushed To Earth Will Rise Again, but after Everlast's unexpected solo career it seemed like we'd seen the last of the Irish triumverate. I can't say that any of the gents in LCN seem to be bringing their A Game to the table on Brand Name Dope, but maybe you'll feel differently. Ill Bill and Everlast are co-executive producers of the project and it seems to be coming out on Ill Bill's Uncle Howie Records in conjunction with Suburban Noize (run by Daddy X, sXe guy from Doggy Style and Kottonmouth Kings). Keep up on the goings-on with the La Coka Nostra here, and look out for the full-length called A Brand You Can Trust in the next couple months.
So when did Morrissey start making good records again? I liked The Smiths as much as the average guy trying to get laid in college and followed the careers of the members in passing as they splintered, but in my heart I was always a Johnny Marr man, although his dalliance with Modest Mouse has tested that devotion in a way that has gone untested since the days of Electronic. I can only pray for a The The reunion tour and/or incarceration of the retarded guy that fronts that nightmare. 
Hey Kids:
Regular readers of JS-NYC know of my love of the Batillus. These Brooklyn metal merchants have pummeled their way into my eardrums on a number of live occasions, but I was anxious to get the home version of the Batillus so that I might share the delights with my neighbors. 
Hey Boys and Girls:
Andi Smith is from St. Louis (her take: cheaper and easier to feel superior there) but despite her lack of residency in time-honored soul-sapping nexuses like NYC or L.A., she has risen to a level that a lot of comedians, female or otherwise, have yet to attain. Maybe you've seen her on Last Comic Standing or Comedy Central. Homeperm is her first record(ing) and it puts her up there with Morgan Murphy and Maria Bamford. She's pretty crass, but just as funny, which makes her pretty aces in my book. Whether you like your humor about foster kids, West Virginia miners or Nigerian prison gang rape, Smith has got you covered.
If you're like me (and I pray that you're not) and you have to have everything your favorite artist releases, the internet can be a godsend. On the other hand, you can get rampant carcass picking (see: Tupac) or lots of rehashing, like our dear friend Puff and his whoring of Biggie's legacy. Puff has released pretty much all of the verses he can cobble together, but there are some rare pre-Bad Boy demo and freestyles recordings out there, most probably from the vaults of DJ 50 Grand, that have leaked out recently.
Scott 'Wino' Weinrich has been around since the dawn of doom metal, whether it be through his early work with The Obsessed or St. Vitus or his recently defunct Hidden Hand, but to the best of my knowledge this is his first solo record. Evidently the demise of HH prompted Wino to take the reins and maybe take advantage of whatever momentum he may have garnered through that Dave Grohl metal record appearance. He drafted in Jean Paul from Clutch and Jon Blank from the unfortunately named Rezin and set to saturating some tape and moving some air.
Eric Hutchinson is from Maryland, although he's currently making NYC his in-between tour home. After releasing Sounds Like This in 2007, he started snowballing via the internet. A friend hooked him up with Perez Hilton, who it terrifies me is now considered a musical tastemaker, and it was off to the races. A deal with Maverick fell through when the label went under, but he became an I-tunes phenom, eventually becoming the highest-charting unsigned artist in the net portal's history. 
Yowza! I blundered on to this blog a day or so ago and it's pretty much taken over my life since then. I wasn't a hardcore kid, although I knew some of the local players in the early 90s Albany scene. Once I moved down to NYC in the early 90s, I ended up meeting and/or playing with a lot of the movers and shakers in the NY Hardcore Scene. As I started getting more and more into the history of the local hardcore scene, it was funny to put the pieces together and realize how close I had been to some of the seminal events in the last 20 years. The JS-NYC location on the swinging Lower East Side is close to a lot of history that's reminisced about and commemorated at Double Cross and I'm glad to have been in the thick of it.
Bizarrely enough, Superchunk - The Clambakes #4: Sur La Bouche Live In Montreal 1993 is the only the second installment of love for the Sweet Chunky Goodness at JS-NYC. Ever odder, it's another live release. This is the fourth installment of The Superchunk Clambakes series. Previous installments contained rarities and improv material, but Vol. 4 documents a ripping live set from Montreal; one that marks the early days of the current Superchunk lineup. As the Francophiles in our midst may have already ascertained, it's a show from the On The Mouth tour. 
G. Dep is yet another casualty of a Bad Boy tenure. With B.I.G dead and Black Rob and Shyne on an Up North Trip, I guess you could say that he got the best of the fallout. After the hype and subsequent fall-out of Let's Get It, Dep relocated down to the Carolinas a couple years ago and set to dropping a gang of mixtapes with DJ Enyce.
Hey Boy(s) and Girl(s):
Jay Bennett is a talented guy. After coming up with Titanic Love Affair in the 90's, he teamed up with Jeff Tweedy post-Uncle Tupelo dissolution to form a little band you may have heard of called Wilco. The first two records were good, great from where I'm sitting, and I saw a ton of the shows behind both releases. The second record, Being There, was a double, and showed Tweedy as a gent that might not be all that tightly wrapped. Perhaps you were at the Mercury Lounge show back in the day when he jumped off the stage, coked to the gills, and grabbed literally their biggest fan by the neck for mentioning that the bass might be too loud, then stormed off like a two-year-old for a half-hour before he returned, asking if all the assholes had left. That was great for all parties involved.
If my trip to Turkey taught me anything, it's that my Dad is a far better person than I am. Now it looks like No Idea and Harvest of Hope have upped the ante their own bad selves. Looks like this asshole might need to write a check or find religion or something.
Bill Burr is a pretty funny guy. I'm not sure where I saw him the first time, but safe money is either Comedy Central or Cringe Humor. He's much more towards the Cringe Humor end of the spectrum. He curses, he'll talk about racism against white people, pedophilia, stereotypes, and generally will call a spade a spade. It's good.
So Wafeek is from St. Louis, but evidently has made an effort to establish a Cali presence in recent years. Long Beach, to be exact. I get a bit of the Heiro vibe in his flow, which combined with his utter avoidance of the Nelly, Twista and/or Bone Thugs flows, puts The Aristocrats Mixtape head and shoulders above the lion's share of Midwestern hip-hop. 
I miss the zine era. I mean the paper ones that you could hold and shit. While I was never the most passionate follower of the more personal ones like Cometbus or Rollerderby (at least then), I enjoyed The Probe quite a bit (and yes, I did read the articles). Hardcore zines like Rumpshaker and Change figured most prominently in my personal stacks, but the siren call of Ebay has prompted the acquisition of scads of music zines. Hell, I have a floor to ceiling wall unit full of them six inches to my right. If I were to be crushed under it, few that knew me well would be shocked. Still, the advent of the Interwebs has homogenized the genre while simultaneously gutting world of the paper zine. Bound compilations of older zines are becoming more and more popular (and necessary) to keep the zine alive. It works for me, and the reissues of Anti-Matter and Schism sure take up a lot less space on the shelf.
This was my travel book on the Turkish junket. I didn't really know that John Robb was as much of a player in the UK punk rock game as he is, but I will give him his due props for opting for the anecdotal format in Punk Rock: An Oral History. Ponderous dissertations have ruined books like Lords Of Chaos for me in the past, plus with jokers like Johnny Rotten and Captain Sensible in the fold, I'd venture it's best not to misquote. Robb is currently the singer for Goldblade and evidently was part of The Membranes, who were evidently held in some esteem in the UK punk scene. He's also written for UK music rag Sounds for some time and can evidently be blamed for coining the term Brit-pop.
DJ Davito represents for new school of old school DJs. He's from Brooklyn and has dropped this mix-tape for free. It's 30 songs and pretty much all bangers. 
Dragonzord is a the brainchild of Philadelphia's Dominic Angiella, aided and abetted by a rag-tag band of Fishtown collaborators. In typical egaltarian fashion, the ever-generous folk of If You Make It have made the four songs from the Dead Broke 7" available for free. Four songs, all with a backing band that's pretty solid in a softer Kill Creek/Ben Deilly-fronted Lemonheads era kind of way, or maybe some of the higher points from the Tree Post-Marked Stamps series. but without getting so noisy on the choruses. If you want a Philly precedent, think some of the more recent Joe Jack Talcum stuff. Angiella's guitar work is particularly strong on these songs. Don't expect any shred pyrotechnics, but the arrangements and playing are pretty damn solid. It seems like he could pull off a lot of these songs solo without too much effort. A lot of bands get buy on volume but Dragonzord don't seem to need that crutch.
Got a chance to catch up with Dave Bierling over the holiday, which is as awesome as you might suspect. In shooting said holiday shit, it came to light that one of the main proprietors of the If You Make It empire was the drummer for the dear departed Potboiler. Yet another reason to lament the passing of that stellar franchise.
This wasn't what I expected. I guess if I had known that Grails were originally called Laurel Canyon, I would have recalibrated accordingly. I thought I'd be getting pummeled by metal, but Grails is much more aligned with stuff like Dead Can Dance or Godspeed You Black Emporer. There's a heavier world music influence than I normally hear this side of Michael Gira curated fare, but with Tod from CopShootCop resuscitating Firewater and Gogol Bordello setting Brooklyn on it's ear, I can see this getting a lot of notice.
Hey Kids:
