Paul Rogers

Hollywood’s Black Veil Brides not only drop albums with a frequency rare in rock music (Black Veil Brides IV, released this week, is their fourth since 2010), but somehow manage to radically reinvent themselves, musically and visually, with each one. Once wing-haired Warped Tour kids in hoodies, they’ve morphed into......

Though mellow and midtempo compared with so much British dance music, trip-hop trailblazers Massive Attack can still bare teeth. The duo's dogged political engagement across their 25-year career (their Facebook page currently invites uncensored debate about Palestine) is a reminder that even eyes-closed, escapist and gently psychedelic electronic music needn't......

As evidenced by their first three albums, England's Kooks can craft charming, often plaintive Britpop ditties seemingly at will. For their fourth full-length, the just-released Listen, lead Kook Luke Pritchard seems to have switched things up almost for the sake of doing so, embracing a much more percussive (and much......

While hardly making them the new Crass, Rise Against's pro-Democrat and human/animal/LGBT rights mutterings sound bold indeed in an era all but devoid of mainstream "political" music. The quartet's serrated yet ultra-anthemic punk-lite, distinguished by reckless groove shifts and Tim McIlrath's earnest, raw-throated roar, is lyrically sincere and musically challenging......

This Santa Cruz quintet certainly looks all deathcore — unison crab-squats, illegible logo T-shirts, confrontational frontman — and, in earlier incarnations, they checked many of that oversaturated genre's sonic boxes. But a decade and many, many members later, AGAtG has become something altogether more oblique, restless and just plain intriguing......

Like fellow genre pioneers The Ruts and The Slits, The Weirdos delighted in defying even what was socially mandated as constituting first-wave punk. Formed in 1976 and currently enjoying the latest in a string of sporadic reunions, these Angelenos shun the gritty, often confrontational imagery of their East Coast and......

It's a shame that Fall Out Boy's street cred is crippled by the quartet's association with the dead-in-the-water emo scene and the tabloid ubiquity of bassist/lyricist (and former Mr. Ashlee Simpson) Pete Wentz. See, FOB at their best check all serious rock-band criteria: irresistible songs; Patrick Stump's vulnerable, emotive vocals;......