Nicholas Pell

Celso Chavez was a mainstay on the Los Angeles music scene for many years, most prominently as guitarist for alt-rock group Possum Dixon, who were featured on an L.A. Weekly cover in 1998. He died one year ago today, May 9, 2012, from a staph infection and pneumonia related to......

Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman has died. The cause was liver failure; he passed at an area hospital near his home this morning. He was 49. Hanneman has not been active in Slayer for the last few years, since suffering a flesh-eating bacteria from a spider bite. No word yet if......

In the 1970s, two bands took the bluesy swagger of the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds to new levels: Recent Songwriter Hall of Fame inductees Aerosmith and proto-punk titans New York Dolls. But which band reigns supreme? The comparison is hardly arbitrary. Readers of Legs McNeil's classic tome Please Kill......

Ok, we get it. You like Sabbath. Everyone does. But there's a whole big world out there of '70s metal bands that goes beyond Sabbath -- even beyond Sir Lord Baltimore, if you can believe that. The '70s offered so much in the way of doom-and-gloom heaviness that it's criminal......

News broke this morning that The Echo has cancelled what was to be the first installment of an event called Insta-Fest, to take place March 30. The punk rock festival, sponsored by Insta-Press Clothing, Durty Mick Records and others, was slated to feature a who's who of international punk and......

You can't please everyone. No sooner had my list of the five best punk rock guitarists gone up than the complaining started. Folks were annoyed that there was a tie for first, yes, but that was only one of the things they found to complain about. Mostly it was about......

Somewhere along the line, punk rock's amateurish enthusiasm became conflated with a dearth of talent. That's OK -- anything to keep the squares out -- but it's not entirely accurate. Indeed, it was hard paring this list down to just five. While you might complain that your favorite isn't on......

No band has ever failed to live up to its own potential quite like Metallica. While the other three quarters of thrash metal's "big four" (Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer) still cut records and tour for receptive audiences, Metallica moved on to Kid Rock and Nickelback territory. We're used to it......

Ancient VVisdom, Royal Thunder, Pallbearer, Enslaved The Troubadour 2-8-13 Better Than: Watching your medicinal marijuana garden grow. The crowd piled in slowly but steadily, the Troubadour alight in blue. This was an older crowd for a metal show, full of parents out for the night, child-free married couples and monk......