NEWS:

US punk Veteran, ex Black Flag front man Henry Rollins is going to be hosting his own radio show in LA. Should be good for a laugh…although I must point out, he’s a very serious man.
Front man from The Rakes has been reported to have said that ‘…Lady Ga Ga dresses like an ugly prostitute’ – thought I’d just syndicate the fued even further. Here’s an idea – it ‘aint the dress that makes a prostitute ugly, however it is the mixture of media hype and mediocrity of the scene that they play in, that make The Rakes, shit. Oh no I Dittent!
Soundgarden have reformed without Chris Cornell –s’gonna be weird.
Someone is leaving Razorlight – drop me a line if you want to know who it is, I’ll do some research and email you back. I purposefully didn’t include this information as I just don’t care, and was afraid it would take up the valuable room needed to tell you that both Janes Addiction and Nine Inch Nails will be playing T in the Park this year, along with the Pet Shop Boys – now that is good news.
On a sad note, The Monkees, Peter Tork has been diagnosed with a rare form of head and neck Cancer. Our hearts go out to him and his family.
Weird robot people, Daft Punk are set to do the score for the remake of early 80’s hit film Tron 2.0. If music were casting, there would be an Oscar here.
Young post-hardcore rock monsters, Enter Shikari have their second album completed and have just announced new tour dates.
And finally, day-glo nu-ravers Klaxons will be headlining the Hartera Festival in Croatia. Um…where?
One of my current favourite bands Silversun Pickups are releasing a new album on the 14th April. Its called ‘Swoon’. Just thought you should know, so you can go out and buy it. You’ll thank me.

Sixx :

I reckon its worth talking about a book I read this year that has somewhat unexpectedly started an influx of musical history in to my mental inbox. Now, I’m a reader and it’s usually novels and stories for me, so when someone I knew told me to read a diary written by a man from a band I don’t remember even liking, I found it unlikely that I would even pick the book up. Turns out I didn’t have to. My pal mailed to me when he got home to Japan two weeks later, so I felt that I ought to give it a go ay the very least.

Man, how wrong can you be about a subject title. I mean, I really had no interest in Motley Crue at all back when they were big, I imagine it was my self imposed musical snobbery circuit kicking in and deleting any reference to bands I ‘shouldn’t’ like. Either way when I picked the book up I had no real Idea who Nikki Sixx was apart from him being the Bass player in a spandex clad, girly, hair metal band.

I’m talkin’ about a book called ‘The Heroin Diaries’ by a man called Nikki Sixx. This is a man who should by rights be dead, and has been…twice. It’s a year in the life of Nikki Sixx back when Motley Crue were just getting big and signing their first deals etc.

People…its grim, and no messin’. A year in the life of a Heroin addicted rock star, is a savage rollercoaster ride of nausea and incredulous surprise…and that’s just for the reader – I can’t even come close to imagining what sort of state he must he must have spent those years in. With my heightened sense of morbid curiosity, I was sucked as soon as I had finished the first page. Its graphic, and it is a true portrayal of a man coming apart at the seams…literally.

It’s easy to read this and figure it’s a work of fiction, but this is different. The book was actually pieced together from Nikki Sixx’s diary, long buried in storage for over 20 years. The nice thing about this is that throughout the diaries, when there are mentions people, there are paragraphs written by those people about the events he describes in his diaries. It’s cool to read the different view points put forward by the very people he talks about, but 20 – 25 years later.

It provides and interesting insight into the LA music scene in the mid 80’s – a lot of bands came from the same scene, Guns ‘N’ Roses, Ratt, Skid Row, it was never my thing really, but nevertheless I have enjoyed the resurgence of 80’s rock that has permeated the office in the last few months, and reading this book has helped immensely.

It made me want to read The Dirt, which is a collection of accounts of events written by each of the band members of Motley Crue. For pure rock ’n’ roll – you can beat this book, its every teenager’s wildest dream in documentary format. For me reading these books has let me understand the music a little better, enabling me to further cast off the chains of musical snobbery that once ruled my little world.

Errrmm…read ‘em.

Something to youtube :

Bored at work or home?
Like Hip-Hop?
Then here’s half an hour you won’t want back.
Go to Youtube.com and search ‘Chip Diddy Chip’
Chipmunk is a rapper presently emerging from the UK Grime scene, linked with Wiley and KIG among others. This boy has some skills, I ‘aint shittin’ ya, and he’s young too – 16 or 17. It’s quite astonishing.

After watching the video for ‘Chip Diddy Chip’ make sure you check out the clips of him free-styling with the guys at BBC 1Xtra – haven’t been blown away by a rapper for ages, but you got check this kid out, he’s gonna be massive.
Word.

Filthy Dukes – Nonsense In The Dark :CD

The latest ‘new music’ to fall to my lap of late is the Filthy Dukes new album.
Now, this has a real 80’s feel about it. For sure, you’ll never get away from that analogy such as that with this band, but there is something really fresh about it. Whilst it is essentially an up-beat dance record, it has a really dark feel to most of the tracks that is enough to intrigue, and make you want to listen to the next one.

It puts me in mind of what Daft Punk might have made if they were 18 or 20 years previous and if they had todays equipment.

Vocal styles on the album range from brooding melodic 2 part harmonies reminiscent of any number of 80’s Bands to punky/shouty vocals, to none at all.

Personally, I like the track construction. For me, they feel like electronic songs delivered in a rock song format. All feel quite commercial so I expect there will be a lot of these guys on the radio and ‘inna da club’ .

Not to discredit it in the slightest, but one track sounds like a cover version of the theme tune from 80’s Kids action show, Air Wolf. Its not but …it could be. Sweet.

’Messages’ is an album highlight for me, super poppy and well danceable, with a funky smooth, slidy synth over the top.

’Tupac Robot Club Rock’ is also a blinder with vocals from Plastic Little – great hip-hop/electronic crossover.

Atari-Alt-Pop

Web Review – The Nerd Parade
OK, so its safe to say that if you send ‘em, I’ll check ‘em out, and likely write something about them in the columns at some point or another. So when our column editor forwarded me a link to a band that had been in touch and asked us to check them out, I was worries. I just hoped for something interesting. Most likely I would think it was shit and write just that, creating a little animosity between 4 angsty teenagers somewhere in the middle of Butt-F&*k, Nowhere and…well, me, here at the Nerdles cyber tribe.
No point in writing about it unless I feel something about it, good or bad, right?
Right, but how happy was I to find that the first user requested review was actually quite an interesting find.

Hailing from Altlanta, Georgia in the US, The Nerd Parade, who clearly found us Googling themselves, claim indie/rock/electronica as their genre span, or at least they do on myspace. Not sure whether that really serves as the best description but it’s certainly heading in that direction. First off, I like it, quite a lot actually.

‘Dead Air and Denial’ is what would have happened if The Surfari’s turned into vampires at the Titty Twister in the film ‘From Dusk Til Dawn’ and rocked out. It’s a great surf-rock tune that somehow turns in to a long outro that sounds like it should be the music for the closing ceremony for the Olympics or something – not sold on this bit, nevertheless, I like the tune and it’s probably one of the highlights for me, along with ‘The Span of a Life’ that immediately puts me in mind of Queens of the Stone Age, and then somehow relents to reveal a group that cannot get away from the sound of where it lives – there is a certain southern rock/country vibe that seems to underlay most of the tracks, even the more electronic tracks, though not as much. It’s a Southern charm that permeates music rather than influences it – bands like The Black Crowes dish it out in buckets, and a band called Paw, from Texas used to regularly throw it out in the acoustic break downs of their grungy alt-rock, and this band show it too in their breakdowns, intro’s and outro’s, and its something that I like.

All in, The Nerd Parade are well worth a listen. It’s a good mix of many genres and sounds from spiky rock guitars & some sweet harmonies, to blues infused break-beats and many things in-between. The track variation is quite diverse too, so there will be something there that appeals to most people. http://www.myspace.com/thenerdparade

7 cowpokes on 10 Steers
Oh yeah…this is my twisted score scheme. An out-of 10 score (purely based on my opinion, other peoples opinion may vary and they have every right to do so), mixed with a possibly offensive stereotype based on location, for which I apologize profusely.
Errr…sorry.

Releases this week :
Artists with new albums floating around the ether this week that should be worth a listen will be Gomez, Ministry, Flo Rida and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Singles attacking your eas on a daily basis if you listen to the radio will be from Lady Ga Ga, Doves, Lady Sovreign and Just Jack – it’s a mixed bag of releases this week if you ask me, I think I’ll just leave the bag at home.

B. Minor

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