Nicholas Pell

Pixies at the El Rey; Credit: Timothy Norris

Pixies – El Rey – September 9, 2013

Nicholas Pell
Pixies The El Rey September 9, 2013 Better than: Slicing up eyeballs. It's hard to say anything about Pixies without devolving into hero worship or jaded and unwarranted dismissal. Not grunge, they played John the Baptist to the movement, famously being Kurt Cobain's favorite group. Their long stable lineup was......
Crom; Credit: jeanclaudephoto.com

Crom: Too Busy With Hardcore Performance Art to Get Famous

Nicholas Pell
Metal group Crom are defined by their intense live performances and their peculiar metal mash-ups. Oh, and their breathtaking lack of ambition. Sure, they count members of famous groups like Mastodon, High on Fire and Slipknot among their fans, and their drummer has been lauded as one of the best......
Haji in Faster

Haji, Star of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Dead at 67

Nicholas Pell
Haji, the Quebec-born actress who most famously starred in iconic cult film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! passed away last night, according to longtime friend Kitten Natividad's Facebook page. She was 67. Haji was born with the equally exotic name Barbarella Catton in Quebec, Canada in 1946. At 14 she began......
Credit: Courtesy of Geffen Records

Appetite For Destruction Is the White Man's Straight Outta Compton

Nicholas Pell
Guns 'N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction and N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton arrived in the summers of 1987 and 1988, respectively. Titanic records, they foreshadowed the more confrontational music of the '90s. Both tell parallel tales of Los Angeles as the Reagan era turned to the Bush 41 era; Compton, the......
ACxDC; Credit: Amanda Lopez

Hardcore Show Cancelled Amid Arson Threats

Nicholas Pell
L.A. hardcore group ACxDC was on the cover of the Weekly recently, and they got a kick out of that. But not all publicity is good publicity. After a local publication in Bend, Oregon spotlighted the powerviolence provocateurs (who practice what might be called a tongue-in-cheek Satanism) ahead of their......
The Buzzcocks in the '70s

The 5 Best Pre-Dookie Pop-Punk Records

Nicholas Pell
Pop punk is enjoying some nostalgic attention these days. Lists crop up here and there, delineating the gems of the genre. However, they all share one subtle flaw: A focus on the major label feeding frenzy that followed Green Day's seminal 1994 word Dookie. (It's on our survey of best......
Dust

Five More '70s Metal Bands Better Than Sabbath

Nicholas Pell
Our last article on metal bands better than Sabbath got quite a response. Some people were angry that we would even suggest that there are better bands than Sabbath. Other people tripped over themselves to offer their own list. There are literally dozens of '70s bands that get overlooked in......