Music A weekly punk rock column by Chris Stamm

I guess I should have written about Arctic Flowers’ Reveries LP a few weeks ago, before the first pressing sold out, but I’m not here to abet collectors. Nope, I’m here to blather at you about amazing things you should be listening to, and I aim to do this blathering in a fri...   More

Movie Reviews & Stories I have seen Steam of Life twice now, but it was only after going over my notes from both viewings that I realized just how frequently the dread specter of death noses into the proceedings. I’d li   More

Music I was, of course, too young to understand nostalgia as a neophyte punk know-it-all and hate-it-all-or-most-of-it-anyway, too green (sometimes literally) to get why anyone would pay to see punk legends of yore. We’re talking 1995-98 here. I remember Agent Orange and Angry Samoans seemed to play in the Bay Area monthly, and I liked “Bloodstains” and Inside My Brain as much as the next geeky, j...   More

Music Due to congenital antipathies toward mandals, public bowel evacuation and unleashed children, I do not attend many outdoor music festivals. Pictures of Coachella crowds make me queasy. You say “Bonnaroo” and I think skin cancer, Dave Matthews-brand giardia and mist tents spiked with patchouli-scented pesticides that temporarily transmute one’s brain into a Ben Harper-loving sponge. This...   More

Music Stories [APOCALYPSE PUNK] “We have no problems singing songs that are not nice at all.” That’s Retox lead screamer Justin Pearson approximately 15 seconds into the brutal 12-minute LP Ugly Animals, whi   More

Music As someone who regularly invites spells of melancholy into his fetid office-cum-vomitorium so that the plangent strains of Leonard Cohen or Elliott Smith might more swiftly sever his most vital psychic veins—as one of those sad flagellants for whom a mood is an excuse for a soundtrack, I mean—I have long longed for extreme (loud, punk, metal, noise, whatever) music that suits my particular bra...   More

Music This is the first installment of Chris Stamm's new punk column, Upper Extremities. He'll be here every week. His logo was illustrated by the great Adam Krueger. -Ed.
I knew very little about the Bi-Marks before I saw them destroy Seattle's The Morgue last Sunday. Elusive creeps, these guys. Myspace page: no updates since 2010. Facebook page: non-existent. Google footprint: ...   More

Movie Reviews & Stories The NW Film Center goes middlebrow every Thursday for the rest of the summer, with evening outdoor screenings on Hotel deLuxe’s garage rooftop. As you can see, I’ve ditched our 0-to-100 scale fo   More

Movie Reviews & Stories Until movies can cure acne and anxiety disorders, praising a film as “life-changing” will remain the sneakiest and saddest kind of critical grandstanding—look at me and my fibromyalgic aesthet   More

Books “They lived as if the fate of the very universe were perpetually at stake and in their hands,” muses an erstwhile member of the “Anarchristian” punk collective brought to begrimed life by Justin Taylor in his ambitious and flawed first novel, The Gospel of Anarchy. The same might be said about    More