By Brian Smith
Published: 9/29/2010
MC5: Sonically Speaking author Brett Callwood is a frequent contributor to Metro Times. He's a soft, gentle and pierced gent who looks like anyone you'd likely find in the pages of Kerrang!, and might well be the sweetest guy you'd ever meet. Here's a drive-by history on Callwood: Born in Manchest...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 6/16/2010
Types: Music, Local Music
Sometimes, if you view the same vacated sightlines and crash the same potholes long enough, life in Detroit can begin to resemble a sound file of droning white noise, a kind of flat-lined, sense-dulling hum — particularly if your pockets are empty. So, to counter said mean reds, we've set...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 6/9/2010
One unfortunate hangover from the 1980s, that decade of overproduced bands, Reagan, MTV gloat, silly trousers and Haircut 100, was how the Psychedelic Furs got lumped into that ghastly pop nostalgia train of ’80s packages, flanking, say, the Bangles, or worse, Missing Persons in (pre-) boomer consci...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 5/19/2010
The band's name was the greatest uni-word translation of pubescent sexuality ever, its singer was an out-of-the-closet (long before it was trendy) U.K. punk rock "star" whose songs rose from a grim Manchester basement to American TV ads pimping Toyota ("What Do I Get") and &mdash...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 5/12/2010
Types: Music
Curtis Mayfield Curtis Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab Curtis Mayfield shouts: "Sisters! Niggers! Whiteys! Jews! Crackers!" and then he adds the song's title line, "Don't worry, if there's a hell below we're all going to go," which then kick-starts the badass fuzzed-out bass...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 4/28/2010
Types: Music
There is no mot juste for what drives an audio junky. For some it's almost sexual, or like a crazy kind of toxic candy that hits the senses from inside the gut and rises slowly, collecting goose bumps along the way, until it sort of erupts in the head and transcends place and time. When music you lo...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 4/14/2010
Bill Withers +'Justments (Reel Music/Columbia) It's hard to underestimate the grace and power of Bill Withers, a guy whose head-spinner confessionals are so rich in empathy ("Better Off Dead," "Grandma's Hands," etc.) that they can get you easily at the knees. His melancholic ...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 4/7/2010
I love how the baseball diamond is basically a vagina. An aerial view of a major ball field clearly shows how it is as anatomically correct as man-carved acreage can be. Not even "bat" and "ball" metaphors and schoolyard schemes of getting to first, second and third base, and n...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 3/3/2010
Kenny Tudrick sits in the bar drinking a Pabst. Wisps of his cigarette smoke twist leisurely around his face, and, for a split-second, in the ashy evening light coming through the window, he looks sullen as all hell. He's wearing a tightly fitted blue-jean jacket over a black T-shirt that reads, in ...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 2/10/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
He's been called a sexist pig and a trash merchant. He's also been called a visionary armed with a heightened sense of irony. Either way he's Jerry Vile (aka Jerry Peterson), storied organizer and mouthpiece of The Dirty Show, now one of the biggest erotic art shows in the world. He's also the forme...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 1/27/2010
His fans know it's astounding what he can ring off inside four minutes. Besides pop hooks and tender epistles, you get literary gibes and folk-derived strolls through suburban dreams, slacker ennui and barstool tragedies that can simultaneously take the piss out of hipster totems and yupster self-gr...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 1/13/2010
I think shitty music should be wiped clean from the earth. Especially the kind made by insensitive cultural freeloaders like Diddy. But the attempts to reconcile the difference between the way the culture is and the way you think it should be never ends, which is one reason — I know from experience ...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 12/23/2009
It's a tragedy that Brittany Murphy's dead. Maybe not only because she was young and beautiful and had a suitcase pimp of a hubby, but because she was a mighty skilled actress, a fact that'll likely be overshadowed by her ditzy film personas. See, beyond the Clueless, Just Married and Don't Say a Wo...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 11/25/2009
Marvin Gaye What's Going On (Gold CD/SACD Hybrid) Let's Get it On (Gold CD/SACD Hybrid) Tamla/Mobile Fidelity The absolute last sonic word on the two best Marvin Gaye albums comes packaged in lovely cardboard mini-LP sleeves, each open-gate, including all original art and credits. The d...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 11/11/2009
Eddie Baranek shouts suddenly from inside the house: "Did you read it?" He hops up from the couch, steps through the open door and points with his Miller beer to a pumpkin that's presiding over the front yard from its elevated perch on the porch. The singer is freshly shaved and Paul Welle...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 9/30/2009
The Gears Rockin' at Ground Zero Hepcat The D.I.s Rare Cuts Hepcat A proper Hollywood rock 'n' roll band always sounded something like the corner of Western and Hollywood Boulevard (and southward from there); grinding dirt and grease and beat-to-shit Datsuns with busted mufflers, trannie hook...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 8/26/2009
Down to impress? Here's a toilet-reader ramble to aid you in choosing a handful of books and records that you need, even if your sole purpose is to appear cool. For the college digit bookshelf, we eschewed the usual hipster dust-collectors (Henry Miller, Palahniuk, Moody, Hornby or anything that Dav...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 6/17/2009
Summertime's teeth are showing and you're flat broke. So the season will force your thoughts southward: You see yourself in crummy DTE lawn seats watching Loverboy and Flock of Seagulls, or cornered at someone's backyard barbecue where ape-draped probationers show you why they aren't allowed to go a...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 6/3/2009
The Rockets The Rockets No Ballads Renaissance It's difficult to listen to Detroit's Rockets without sensing tragedy, nodding mostly to its singer Dave Gilbert, a guy gifted with sexual tension and a voice tailored for '70s FM radio, but who drank himself out of stardom, and later, into the gr...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 4/29/2009
In the spirit of last days of school (and, um, the schools actually closing in Detroit) — we're all hopped up on the new, limited-edition reissue of Alice Cooper's School's Out CD. To the point: 1972's School's Out is the most underrated album in the Alice Cooper canon — hell, one...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 4/15/2009
Steal a turntable, punk: For years, we've orated long and hard our undying support of local record stores and have looked for any excuse to hoist a beer in their honor. So it is that the second annual national Record Store Day is this Saturday, April 18, and what a lovely time for a frothy one...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 4/22/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Poetry
Shit I'm shaking as I write this. DTs are a motherfucker. My hands are balled in tight fists. It's time for war. I'm standing. Damn it. I'm standing. Wish me luck. The typed, signed letter that accompanied this book sent in by its author — whose envelope was sloppily hand-addressed &...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 3/4/2009
Types: Music, Local Music
Here's a little roundup of upcoming bands oozing from this area's ephemera, and ones you'd most likely otherwise miss at Blowout numero 12. We quizzed 'em for kicks and got back youthful smirks and some irony-rich, sweeter-than-you commentary. Some even listed their ages! —Compiled by Bria...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 3/4/2009
Aw, shit. It's a frigid Monday afternoon and songwriter-singer Matt Jones is at tonight's show venue in Columbus, Ohio, but its doors are locked. The joint's closed. Of course it is. Think about it: If you're some unknown dude out peddling your tunes, 35 cities in 37 days — road-dog style ...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 12/17/2008
Types: Cover Story
My facial features felt like frozen protrusions, as if stung by bees. Toes were beyond any description of pain; I imagined them plum-colored and shriveled-up like dead baby birds, inside those cleated shoes, affixed to those pedals. Lungs were numbed and throat was blocked by a petal of icy phlegm. ...[MORE]
Enter your email address to get our weekly emails.
Full Feed