We try to keep tabs on various festivals around the world here on BrooklynVegan, many of which you'll eventually see pictures from. Today we focus on Belgium.

Pukkelpop goes down from August 16 - 18. That festival includes The Stone Roses, Bjork, Bloc Party, The Black Keys, Refused, Wilco, The Hives, The Shins, The Afghan Whigs, Lykke Li, Hot Chip, Feist, Flying Lotus, tUnE-yArDs, Chromatics, Cloud Nothings, The Tallest Man on Earth, Baroness, Ceremony, A-Trak, Rustie, Hudson Mohawke, and more. The full lineup is listed below. Tickets for the festival are on sale now.

Rock Werchter, which falls a bit more on the mainstream side, happens in Belgium even sooner, running from June 28 - July 1. That lineup includes The Cure, Jack White, X, Mastodon, Garbage, The xx, M83, Metric, Amon Tobin, Skrillex, Perfume Genius, Bat For Lashes, Michael Kiwanuka, Alabama Shakes, My Morning Jacket, Regina Spektor, Florence + the Machine, The Vaccines and more. Tickets for the festival are on sale now sold out.

The full lineups for both Pukkelpop and Rock Wercher are listed below.

Continue reading "full 2012 Pukkelpop & Rock Werchter lineups"

photos by Vincent Cornelli

"You ready for some Grateful Dead action after this?" asked singer Julian Casablancas early in the Stokes set, referring to Furthur, the band led by the Dead's Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, already in progress at the eastern edge of the polo field. The uncertain response suggested fans were staying put - just as others were for Furthur. The Strokes sounded exceptionally muscular in the park's expansive setting. Fabrizio Moretti contributed heavy beats to "Vision of Division" and "Reptilia," as Casablancas eased his vocals from deadpan to excited and back again. "This is It" slowly built to a sing-along as Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi created an intricate overlap of guitars. "I remember playing these songs in front of four people," Casablancas said, looking out on the tens of thousands of fans. "It's really surreal." Even, apparently, after all the year's of the band's success. -[Rolling Stone]

"...At about 5:50 PM, one of the day's best acts appeared at the Outside Lands Festival.

The music was thumping, adrenaline pumping, the sun shining, and many in the crowd -- tapping into a singular energy -- could hold back no longer. They put their inhibitions aside and let themselves be drawn to the beats blasting from the Twin Peaks Stage. Some ran, jumped and moved like they never had before, heading toward a common purpose.

Of course, I'm referring to the bum rush of fans that managed to scramble past the guards and bust down part of the fence along John F. Kennedy Drive, allowing scores of people to hustle in before the riot control guards on horsies and the rent-a-guard dudes in orange t-shirts could stop the inflow." - [San Francisco Chronicle]

Videos of the incident, with the rest of our pictures from the 2010 Outside Lands Festival, below...

Continue reading "more pics from Outside Lands (where fans crashed through a fence to get in) (videos of that too) "

Slash released a special-guest-filled album solo called called "Slash" in March. Four of the five members of the Appetite for Destruction era Guns N' Roses lineup appear on the album: Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan and Steven Adler. You can figure out who's missing. Iggy Pop, Ozzy, Lemmy, Dave Grohl, Chris Cornell, and others (even Fergie?) (but not Jack White) appear as guests on the album too. You can stream it, and download a track, below.

Slash is currently on tour in Europe. In fact, you may have heard about how he was "attacked" by a fan on stage at a recent show. That viral video is below.

Slash starts playing North American shows in September. That now includes a September 14th show at Terminal 5 in NYC. $32.50 tickets go on sale Friday at noon. All currently announced dates, the attack video, album stream/download widgets and the full "Slash" album tracklist (with guests), below...

Continue reading "Slash, recently "attacked" on stage, released a guest-filled album, touring, playing Terminal 5"

Outside Lands 2009 (more by Chris Graham)

San Francisco's Outside Lands Festival 2010 takes place in Golden Gate Park from August 14th-15th. Headlining acts for the fest include Kings of Leon, Furthur featuring Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, The Strokes, My Morning Jacket, Phoenix, Social Distortion, Levon Helm and Al Green. Other acts include Nas & Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley, The Budos Band, Dawes, Gogol Bordello, Cat Power Janelle Monáe and Tokyo Police Club. The full lineup (which will be added to) is below.

Two-day passes go on sale Tuesday, June 2nd at 1pm EST. Single day tickets go on sale Sunday, June 6th.

Check out pictures from all three days of Outside Lands 2009 (which as you may have figured out was one day longer than this year's).

A video trailer for this year's fest and the lineup is below...

Continue reading "Outside Lands 2010 lineup announced"

by BBG

Frank Frazetta's Dark Kingdom from 1976, which was the basis for the Molly Hatchet album cover Flirtin' with Disaster

Frank Frazetta is one of the most prolific and well known illustrators of the 20th century, ...due in part to the variety of media in which his art has appeared (comics, posters, album covers, books, etc.), but also to his very recognizable style. ...He received formal art training at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts... [and] entered into the world of comic book illustration at the age of 16, with work on Shining Knight comics. His early work was for DC, but he later did work for Timely (Marvel), Standard, and Toby.... In 1952, he worked as an assistant for Al Capp ("L'il Abner"), but quit in 1960 after disagreement over salary cuts. He turned to paperback cover illustrating to pay the bills. While not very lucrative at the time, the illustrations are today sought by many collectors, especially his work on the Edgar Rice Burroughs titles (Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and others). In the mid 60s Frazetta joined other former EC cartoonists at Warren Publications, where he worked on "Creepy", "Eerie", and helped design Vampirella. Frazetta's work was probably at its most popular in the 1970s, where it could seen almost everywhere. His drawings were and are instantly recognizable - the men are impossibly muscular, the women are supernaturally beautiful, and the monsters are indescribably hideous. -[imdb]

Continue reading "Frank Frazetta, RIP"

"The 2010 Lollapalooza line-up is official: Soundgarden, Green Day, Lady Gaga, Arcade Fire, The Strokes, and Phoenix will headline, joined by Social Distortion, MGMT, Jimmy Cliff, Hot Chip, and The Black Keys. With 130 bands on this year's bill, its sure to be a weekend long feast for the ears.

It's a monumental year for Lollapalooza, filled with homecomings, reunions, and first-times. Soundgarden, 1992 and 1996 Lollapalooza alumni, return to the Lollapalooza stage for their first performance since 1997. Green Day will rock Grant Park sixteen years after their first Lollapalooza appearance. While Lady Gaga will headline the festival only three short years after playing the BMI stage at Lollapalooza 2007.

Arcade Fire returns to Grant Park, having played the reincarnated Lollapalooza in 2005. This is the first Lollapalooza for The Strokes - and also their first show in four years. And making their Lollapalooza debut: Phoenix." - Lollapalooza

Continue reading "Lollapalooza actually announces 2010 lineup "

words & photos by Benjamin Lozovsky

When a musical act does what it does well, it can be hard to ignore. Their music might not be wildly innovative or emotionally challenging or rhetorically complex; but a pretty picture is still a pretty picture, no matter how much one may try to elicit some bogus existential commentary from its depths. Wolfmother might be one the quintessential examples of such an approach in today's rock landscape; you know exactly what to expect, and yet you still end up surprised and exhilarated when a head-on experience with the band is through.

Such was the attractive canvas on view Monday night (11/9) at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, where the band played its second of two New York City gigs as part of its 2009 North American tour with The Heartless Bastards (the first was at the much larger Terminal 5 in Manhattan). With as much subtly as a Jeff Koons masterpiece, Wolfmother ripped through a nearly two-hour set of cleverly interpreted 70's arena rock pastiche, replete with all the genre-characterizing theatrics one would come to expect from a band categorically set on suckling from the same breast as their prototypical influences.

continued below...

Continue reading "Wolfmother & Heartless Bastards @ MHOW - pics & setlist"

Wolfmother has added a show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on November 9th, one day after their Terminal 5 show which part of of a fall tour with Heartless Bastards. thenewno2 open both NYC shows (and maybe the tour) as well. Tickets for the MHOW show go on AmEx presale Wednesday (10/28) at noon and general sale Friday at noon. Tickets to Terminal 5 are still available.

Wolfmother's new record Cosmic Egg, their first with a new lineup, is out today on DGC/Interscope/Modular. Coming up, the band tours across North America and Europe, then goes on an Australian tour with AC/DC. Those dates are below...

Continue reading "Heartless Bastards touring w/ Wolfmother, MHOW show added - updated 2009 Tour Dates "

Now finished touring with The Killers, Wolfmother are going on their own tour in October and November. They play Terminal 5 in NYC on November 8th. Tickets are on sale (@ noon). All dates below.

The Cult headlined a show at Terminal 5 on September 11th. They played their album "Love" in its entirety...

"Last night I saw the Cult play live at Terminal 5 with my friend Daniela. A spectacular show. Ian Astbury voice is as strong as ever. This was the Love tour, and they played all their best songs... She Sells Sanctuary, Rain, Hallow Man, Revolution... To be honest, when they first started playing, it sounded like them, but Ian looked so different. To be fare, I was up on the balcony, so I couldn't see any details of his face. But long gone was the long black hair and bandana!

The crowd was great! A true mix of their 80's followers; heavy metal throwbacks, bikers, goths, old punks. And then the rest of us.. mainly the above 40 crowd." [mommy drinks style]

And last but not least (for this semi-themed post), Type O Negative tend to surface near Halloween every year or two. This year it will be October 16th at Starland Ballroom, October 22nd at Nokia Theatre in NYC, and October 24th at Northern Lights. Tickets for all three are on sale (@ noon). Detroit gets the Halloween show. All dates below...

Continue reading "Wolfmother, The Cult & Type O Negative - dates & tickets "

The Depreciation Guild @ The Bell House in January (more by Jonny Leather)

Wolfmother (sort of) played the PNC Bank Arts Center in NJ with the Killers last night (9/2). The night before that it was at Jones Beach. Tomorrow it's Boston followed by Montreal and then Toronto. But tonight is a night off that they will spend at The Bowery Electric in NYC where they will go on after The Depreciation Guild who reportedly hit the stage at 10:30 PM.

For The Depreciation Guild, this is a warm up gig before they hit the road with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Cymbals Eat Guitars.

Wolfmother's new album Cosmic Egg is out October 13th via Interscope. All dates and an entertaining Wolfmother-album-promo video below...

Continue reading "secret Wolfmother show in NYC tonight ++ other Depreciation Guild tour dates"

Grammy Award winning rock band Wolfmother has announced the resignation of bass/keyboard player Chris Ross and drummer Myles Heskett effective immediately.

Continue reading "2/3 of Wolfmother quit the band"

Lily Allen & Jagermeister

David Cross & ?uestlove

Continue reading "some pictures from Bonnaroo 2007"

DOWNLOAD John Zorn - Lilin (MP3)

You know what really sucks? Peeping Tom sucks. (above video also seen on Stereogum & Blabbermouth)

Mike Patton (who I like less-and-less) is playing with frequent-collaborator John Zorn @ Tonic in NYC on New Years Eve, again.

Nels Cline (Wilco) is playing the John Zorn-owned NYC club The Stone on December 28th with Zeena Parkins (2 shows), and again on December 29th with Vinny Goila and Ken Filiano. Other Nels dates here.

The Stone has four special benefit shows coming up on December 25th (Christmas day) and December 30th (New Years eve-eve). The two shows on Christmas will feature "Many special guest and surprises", and for the shows on the 30th we should "Expect anyone and anything in this final 2006 Stone extravaganza!"

Review of Wolfmother's recent sold-out show at Hammerstein Ballroom here.