Music

Mixing rockabilly with punk, the revved-up howlings of Matt Verta-Ray’s Speedball Baby and Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion form Heavy Trash. The band spoke with author Tom Vale for ALARM’s fall cover story.

Bhangra beats and Atari-era visuals inundated a sold-old audience at Los Angeles’ Wiltern LG on Friday as musical nomad M.I.A. took the stage. Provocative, fresh, and funky, the Sri Lankan singer/rapper rounded up a small posse of her hip-hop doppelgangers to deliver a frenetic hour-long party.

Vancouver-based group Primes — consisting of snythesist/vocalist Tanya Pea, bassist/vocalist Jack “JJD” Duckworth, and synthesist Erik West — is back with eleven tracks for its sophomore release, Facades and Pink Forms. With this release, technology’s heavy influence has not loosened its grip on Primes.

The Bouncing Souls frontman Greg Attonito and wife Shanti Wintergate have created a children’s book together, titled I Went for a Walk. Illustrated by Attonito and written by Wintergate, the story touches on lessons of equality, tolerance, beauty, and variety.

In 1908, Hungarian composer Bela Bartok was so intrigued by Eastern European folk and Gypsy music that he began fusing it with his classical compositions. Now, 100 years later, Romanian troupe Taraf de Haidouks returns the favor by giving Bartok’s classical pieces a Gypsy makeover on their new record, Maskarada (Crammed Discs).

Jon Spencer and Matt Verta-Ray, also known as rockabilly group Heavy Trash, are making a “rare return” to the west coast with tour dates from November 7 through the 18th in support of their second album, Going Way Out With Heavy Trash (Yep Roc).

German dance producer Alexander Ridha, who records as Boys Noize, creates stark, dirty, and direct tracks with hard, crisp breaks. Leslie Feist, whose breathy track “My Moon My Man” was remixed by Boys Noize into a slow-boiling dance anthem, called the producer’s work “the dirtiest clean I’ve ever heard.”

Parched, the new side project from Ephel Duath guitarist/founder Davide Tiso, have completed their debut album. The Italian prog-metal heavyweight’s new jaunt consists of a rich, atmospheric sound that tries to “capture and recreate the sound of a desert/urban desert atmosphere.”

Anomalous genre amalgamators Estradasphere have announced the forthcoming release of The Pegasus Vault EP, a collection of unreleased studio material that will accompany an assortment of leftovers from their last full-length album, Palace of Mirrors.

In this post-Strokes world of taut guitar pop, street-cool crooners, and ubiquitous use of the word “the,” it’s getting awfully hard for down and dirty rock bands to stand out.

“For us, this is the end of our first era,” says Akron/Family bassist Miles Seaton, discussing his psych-folk band’s third full-length release.

Posted today on the website of prog-fusion poster boys The Mars Volta, a biography on forthcoming full-length The Bedlam in Goliath tells an odd tale of murder, a haunted Ouija board, and band leader/composer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez nearly scrapping the album.