Paul Rogers

The Offspring are big on record sales, small on street cred. Best known for novelty radio hits like 1998’s “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy),” the Huntington Beach quartet tend to be brushed off as featherweight fluff: the Sugar Ray of their generation. But that may change. Inspired by the......

BETH GIBBONS & RUSTIN MAN at Avalon, October 26 An intriguing duo: Beth Gibbons, intoxicating vocalist with England’s Portishead (whose 1994 debut, Dummy, is a uniquely gorgeous gallery of trip-hop noir they’ve never bettered) and Rustin Man (a.k.a. Paul Webb), erstwhile bassist with defunct ’80s Brit prog-popsters Talk Talk, sadly......

A Perfect Circle is a side-project supergroup that wryly defies both of these enduring rock & roll clichés. Firstly, for all the alt-rock luminaries involved (the current APC lineup includes Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan, former Marilyn Manson bassist Jeordie White a.k.a. Twiggy Ramirez, ex–Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha and......

REM at the Hollywood Bowl, September 10 REM have long been the Abercrombie & Fitch of alt-rock: durable, dependable merchants of one-song-fits-all contemporary Americana. But onstage fights, apparent splits and the departure of ailing drummer Bill Berry have made us all — the band included — appreciate that perhaps this......

EVANESCENCEat Universal Amphitheater, August 4 At last: Hot Topic, the musical. Though introduced tonight as “big rock from Little Rock,” this Arkansas outfit were in fact installed in L.A. some time ago by their record label to be groomed for greatness. And the grand scheme has delivered, inasmuch as Evanescence’s......

Don’t even try and you will never beg. —“One Weak,” Deftones, 1995 Since Korn first pounded us with their then-revolutionary hip-hop–heavy metal hybrid in 1994, so-called nu-metal has been one of the music industry’s more stable, and sometimes spectacular, earners. Linkin Park’s cultured take on the genre spawned 2001’s best-selling......

Photo by Lawrence Watson "I DON'T KNOW IF I SIT THERE THINKING, 'OH, I'm very English tonight,'" muses Paul Weller, addressing the alleged barrier between his message, with its peculiarly British slant and slang, and American ears. "People say, 'Is it too English?' But Monty Python's fucking massive [in the......

TOOL at Long Beach Arena, November 24 Long Beach Arena on a dank Sunday night made a strangely subdued setting for Tool's final show of their seemingly endless Lateralus world tour. Yet, far from being burnt-out, these relentlessly uncompromising prog-rock torchbearers were in fine fettle from the opening mechanical refrain......

Two years back, L.A. emo-core flag-bearers Open Hand performed to a strangely sparse crowd at Hollywood’s now defunct Opium Den. The problem: The club was 21 and up, so not only were most of Open Hand‘s teenage fans excluded, but the youthful band members barely scraped in themselves, and their......

L.A. quintet Rooney lead a charmed life -- so charmed they don’t even know it yet. Blood-linked to one of the industry‘s hippest bands (front man Robert Carmine is the brother of Phantom Planet drummer Jason Schwartzman, and Rooney’s very first show was a P.P.-fan-club shindig at the Troubadour), blessed......