Greg Burk

Can’t stand it? Get over it. Cookie Monster metal — the genre(s) where a voxdude woofs notelessly atop fretboard frenzy and a zillion whacks of kick drum — has got something for you. Death metal, grindcore, metalcore, goremore, godslash, pottytrain and all those metals began around the dawn of the......

KITTEN SPARKLES, JUSTICE YELDHAM AND THE DYNAMIC RIBBON DEVICE, DAVE PHILLIPS, LETICIA CASTANEDA at Il Corral, April 11. A bare converted garage not quite in Hollywood. Thin artfolk standing around, sullen. Performance noise on the menu. Running commentary from an ex-Germ, Don Bolles. Leticia Castaneda’s mumbled meditations are an absent......

SONNY ROLLINS at Disney Concert Hall, March 16 A ghostly-looking Sonny Rollins drifted onto the stage and blew a gusher of near-classic tenor wilding for 10 minutes. And that’s what I’ll remember. The rest was a brave effort to keep the carnival wheels turning with no gas left in the......

Photo by Barbara DuMetzBennie Maupin’s angels kept dying on him. At Blue Note Records, co-founder Francis Wolff dug the swaying of Maupin’s reeds on the label’s Horace Silver, Lee Morgan and McCoy Tyner records, and was about to let Maupin cut his own wax. 1971: Wolff, RIP. Charlie Faske, an......

Photo by Ross Halfin Last week we herded some old Judas Priest fans together who were stoked to hear that Rob Halford, metal’s original screamer, had rejoined his mates for Angel of Retribution — the first Priest/Halford recording since 1990’s Painkiller. (Farewell to Priest cover-band singer Ripper Owens, who substituted......

Photo by Steve MarutaOne of the biggest holes in my music-loving life gets patched soon: I will see Sonny Rollins play live. Should have done it before; there can be no good excuses (though I’ll toss out a few bad ones in a sec), because Rollins is non-omissible. Now 74,......

Blackmore's Night photosby Wild Don Lewis BLACKMORE’S NIGHT at the Wilshire Theater, February 5 Monks grab-assed duchesses in the aisles as Blackmore’s Night, the Renaissance-mewsick troupe of former Deep Purple ax cleaver Ritchie Blackmore, paraded into ye olde Wilshire Theater for revelrie surreale. The acid was less lysergic than uric......

John Zorn’s music is hard to locate, conceptually and sometimes physically. He’s many artists; so which exactly do you seek? Trying to write something unstupid to preview Zorn’s ghost visit this weekend, I grabbed a bunch of his music and put ear to it for an aesthetic refresher. Umm. Uneasiness......

Photos by Wild Don Lewis DANZIG Key Club, December 29 A prime Danzig experience can be biblically elemental, violent, contradictory, poetic. Absurd to some, Glenn Danzig’s brow-knit hardness and grievous sensuality are really about survival: You can’t fight through the dark unless you notice that the light went out. So......