Drop drinks are making a comeback at bars across America. Prepare your liver.

READ MORE »

If you’re going to cop your sound from bands that were around 30 years ago, you’d better be damn good at it or make it obvious that you’re just taking the piss. Wolfmother never quite did either, leaving the listeners of their debut album wondering, Are they for real? Don’t count on Cosmic Egg to clear that up. The Aussie trio thump and bump through the Sabbath-influenced title track, “Cosmic Egg,” and deliver their own “D’Yer Mak’er” on the hip-shaker “White Feather.” Then frizzy-haired singer-guitarist Andrew Stockdale drops an eye-rolling line like, “Standing in the front of the rainbow/Could you tell me where all the people go?” and you have to stop head-banging, even if just for a second.

Slayer fans are so devoted that one might throw up the devil horns and scream “Slayer!” through the window as this is being written. The thrash titans built that blind loyalty through an onslaught of savage albums and brutal live shows. The group’s 10th album continues the Slayer mission: Take the ugliness of the world and turn it back on itself. Chemical warfare (“Unit 731”), apocalypse (“World Painted Blood”), and pandemics (“Human Strain”) all get the Slayer treatment with sharp-as-shrapnel guitar riffs and thundering drums. The stabbing riff of “Hate Worldwide” is vintage Slayer as singer-bassist Tom Araya grimaces, “I’m a godless heretic/Not a God-fearing lunatic/That’s why it’s become my obsession/To treat God like an infection.” We never doubted them.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is the superpower of shooter games. This sequel takes the first-person-shooter genre to new heights with a thrilling story that picks up from the last game and features frantic co-op challenges and the best multiplayer around. The explosive single-player campaign includes dangerous new war scenarios that find you scaling icy mountains to infiltrate a top-secret base, racing a snowmobile down a mountainside while dodging a hail of enemy fire, and tailing terrorist suspects through the crowded Brazilian slums. Multiplayer ups the ante with new customizable kill streaks that let you unleash the fury of an AC-130 gunship upon those suckers sitting in broad daylight. 

Polar Bear Club’s debut album made best-of lists everywhere, but it takes until nearly the end of this follow-up for them to prove why. Not that Chasing Hamburg isn’t brilliant—it’s just that “One Hit Back,” a post-hardcore punch to haters everywhere, is so fist-pumping good that its shadow looms over the rest of the songs. “Living Saints” comes close as singer Jimmy Stadt swears, “All my friends are living saints” over guitars that leap from mellow to pit-stirring. Mostly, Polar Bear Club mix the passion and fury of Hot Water Music and Latterman with hooks and a spit-polish (with an occasional nod to Lifetime—see “Drifting Things”). And we swear to spend more time with the rest of the album once we take “One Hit Back” off Repeat.

It's a tried and true formula: the songwriter for a pioneer band spends the winter snowed in with a pile of old records and a collection of instruments and pulls together a twangy album of noisy folk. When it’s Chris Crisci from The Appleseed Cast, we’ll give it a chance. “Under” has all of the elements of a basement record, including harmonica, mandolin, and slightly offbeat vocals, as does the barren banjo instrumental “Black Hill Chapel.” Crisci sounds more confident backed by the tight strumming and tambourine beat of “Trust,” a song ripe with Pedro the Lion/David Bazan influences in which he sings, “Little one be careful/There are people out there who’ll steal your soul.” It’s old-timey advice that still stands up.

From indie movie staple to human lie detector, the British actor hasn't been shy about documenting his life and career in ink. Now if he can just remember how many tattoos he's got.

READ MORE »

What a long, strange, really weird trip it’s been for the Flaming Lips. The beloved band has survived more than 20 years of musical upheaval while becoming the elder statesmen of experimental rock whose “Do You Realize??” was named the Oklahoma state rock song. The Lips sound stranger than ever thanks to a formula of less guitar, more drums, and trippy sounds. The blown-out beats and throbbing bass lines of “Worm Mountain” and “See the Leaves” show the Lips’ psychedelic side. Singer Wayne Coyne lends his trembling voice to “If” with the opening line “People are evil this is true/But they can be gentle if they decide.” It’s that weird innocence that makes the Lips so endearing.