by Pico It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled… -Led Zeppelin What can I say, I’ve let a lot of release dates on the mainstream side go by without any mention. And so, it’s catch-up time. Three major acts, plus an act with a major cause. NoRead More

by Nick DeRiso General Patterson’s “Shackville,” recorded with former bandmates from north Louisiana bar-band legends Howard Shaft, moves like a warm, rustling breeze through the treetops. Surprising, indeed, for an on-stage performer known for his rumbling Southern-fried blues grind. Where Patterson’s shows typically push out from the stage with aRead More

by Pico You know, it’s funny how making a record can be so quickly habit-forming for some. Here we have the early sixties regional garage band Mike And the Ravens who make a proper debut album about 48 years after they had formed. That’s right, folks, as in a fewRead More

by Pico Lately, a recent CD by Nicki Gonzalez has been getting out into wider release, this one being her first album in the newest phase of her varied music career: that of a solo hard-edged singer-songwriter. Washington, DC native and local star Gonzalez has been around the block aRead More

The rock landscape is littered with immensely talented bands who, for some reason or another, never got off the ground. And I’ll bet virtually no one has heard of about 98% of them. The remaining 2% are those whose talent wasn’t recognized until it was too late, or the bandRead More

December 17, 2008. That’s the last time a non-jazz record has appeared on a Quickies column. In the intervening half-year there’s been so many fresh non-jazz records that merits at least a few paragraphs, and sometimes the full fledged reviews can’t adequately cover ’em all. So guess what…it’s a QuickiesRead More

by Pico The last time I covered a band out of Providence RI, I was thunderstruck by the wonderfully weird folks who make up the musical buffet table Barnacled. On the other end of the spectrum but in the same seaside New England town hails an folk-rock outfit called TheRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Hybrids are all the rage these days; you see Toyota Priuses and Honda Insights filling up our roadways as recent gas price hikes has engendered a greater focus on fuel efficiency. There’s was recently another cool new hybrid unveiled, but this isn’t a hybrid of gasRead More

‘Mama Rosa,’ named after Brian Blade’s grandmother, is a thematic album built around family, faith and early life events, as well as people he’s come to love along the way.

The frontman from ? and the Mysterians once said that voices from the future told him they would still be playing “96 Tears” in the year 10,000. So far, so good.