Rock and Roll and Storytelling have gone hand in hand for a long time.  Some of the greatest rock records of all time (Tommy, The Wall, The Downward Spiral) have all been based around narratives that highlight the extremities of the human condition.  In a singles-driven market, that’s harder and harder to do.  But that doesn’t stop bands like Sweden’s innovative yet affectionately old-school rockers, Pressure. The band is dropping their next album, In a...

Full disclosure: I’ve been a fan of Ho99o9 since hearing their first album “United States of Ho99o9” a few years ago.  Their mesh of punk-fueled chaos, metal aggression, dark hip hop and trap elements and industrial sleaze was exactly the kind of kitchen-sink creativity I’d been craving since diving into genre-fluid music almost 20 years ago.  Here was a band who finally realized what The Beatles and Bowie had been trying to tell us since...

A few months ago, it was my distinct pleasure to interview the amazing Sam Astaroth, formerly of the band Astaroth Incarnate, about the DMX cover he’d just dropped at the time, in tribute to one of his fallen heroes. Today, I’m presenting yet another masterful cover by the vocal acrobat, that of Ghostemane’s “Fed Up”, and I don’t say this often, but this version may be superior to the original. Sam Astaroth is the kind...

I would like a time machine.  I would like to use said time machine to go back and visit a bored 15-year-old Caleb Straus in Freshman English being taught how to properly write an essay and comfort him with the knowledge that at the age of 40, not only will he be permitted to use the word “ShitDicks” in a sentence, it will in fact be his solemn duty as a music journalist.  And then...