Posts by April Fox

According to the National Institutes of Health, deaths by opioid overdose in the United States rose from just over 21,000 per year in 2010 to more than 80,000 in 2021, in large part due to the sharp increase in Fentanyl abuse. That’s roughly 220 people per day dying of preventable overdose, and a small but […]

If there’s one thing Pixies’ drummer David Lovering wants fans to know, it’s that they aren’t an asocial band. “We don’t do banter, we don’t make jokes in between songs, we just get up there and play. It’s not that we don’t want to be there, we aren’t being asocial, we just want to do […]

What do you get when you gather four middle-aged dudes who like to smoke weed and have close to a century of cumulative music experience? You get a little band out of Asheville, NC, called The Beard, and despite the many reasons why this shouldn’t be anything extraordinary, it is.  Asheville has a long and […]

Nothing breaks the mid-week slump like a good old-fashioned punk show, and the Circle Jerks’ show on Wednesday, July 20, was the perfect thing to celebrate being halfway through the work week and one step closer to the weekend. This stop at The Orange Peel in Asheville, NC – part of their 2022 tour with […]

When you add up the respective years that Ministry, Melvins, and Corrosion of Conformity have been playing, the sum is a rather mind-blowing 120 years. It might stand to reason, then, that at least one of these bands should be slowing down. Eventually, the energy should wane, right? Wrong. Each a pivotal player in the […]

Dig out your boom boxes friends, and get ready for something spectacular as Family Vision is back with their second album, out on cassette March 11 via Julia’s War Recordings. While their first, self-titled album was beautifully grimy in its lo-fi presentation, Plastic Form is a little bit cleaner, but no less true to the […]

Tearing out of Southern California way back in 1979, Agent Orange took the ferocity of the ripening punk rock sound, crushed up some surf rock, and threw that in, and the result ended up being one of the longest-running touring punk bands in the world. Their shows reflect that longevity and their ability to keep […]

For more than 30 years, JD Pinkus has been on the radar of every self-respecting punk, alt, and psychedelic music fan on the planet. From joining Austin punk legends Butthole Surfers in the mid-80s to his time with the Melvins in the late 2000s, not to mention various other projects including Honky, Daddy Longhead, and […]

Before you read this, take everything you’ve heard about the Asheville, NC music scene and chuck it out the window. Throw it hard, maybe let it clip the head of the bouncer checking IDs a floor below while the wooks and the wokes smoke cigarettes and talk about their star signs on the sidewalk. In […]

J.D. Pinkus has been all over the place in his musical career, from the Texas trippiness of the Butthole Surfers to the bottoms-up hard-rock band Honky that he formed in the mid-’90s to the double-bass extravaganza that was the Melvins’ 2018 album Pinkus Abortion Technician (a title riffed off of the Butthole Surfers’ 1987 self-recorded […]

In 2020, music fans and festival-goers were held in suspense as one by one, events were canceled or postponed indefinitely due to the worsening pandemic. When FloydFest did the responsible thing and added themselves to the list of events that wouldn’t be happening that summer, fans began to look hopefully toward 2021. Their cautious optimism […]

At times when the world feels like absolute chaos, enjoying yourself can seem almost like an act of rebellion. There’s a certain defiance in saying “fuck you” to the current events and worries taking up space in our heads, and filling them instead with the kind of music that grabs you by the guts and […]

I kicked off the AJJ show at Asheville, NC’s notorious Grey Eagle on February 7th by inadvertently insulting the opening act, Emperor X. My sidekick and I got there a little later than I’d hoped, and the venue was already packed just before showtime — more populated than I’d ever seen it, in fact, even […]

Mudhoney’s recent show at Asheville’s Grey Eagle (10/10)  was everything a Thursday night concert should be. It was loud, it was fast, it was in your face and raw as hell, starting with the first note of Pissed Jeans’ opening set and running straight through to the very end when Mark Arm and co. walked […]

There are as many kinds of grieving as there are bottles on the bar shelf: The loud and wailing kind done at the graveside; the sloppy, sentimental kind soaked in gin and whiskey, draped across the shoulders of the folks holding you up; the pretending to be in control kind, breath-holding, eyes closed, count to […]

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone born in the past 70 years or so who doesn’t recognize Bob Dylan’s influence as an artist. Plenty of folks find his unmistakable voice to be grating; others may refute his worth as a Nobel Prize-winning poet, but his versatility as a musician and his impact on modern music […]

Asheville, North Carolina is a town with a growing reputation as a mecca for up and coming musicians, as well as a popular stop on the touring circuit for many big name acts. It’s true that you can hardly spit in any direction without hitting a hopeful troubadour with a song and guitar, and on […]

Listening to an album by the Melvins is very similar to having a long, meandering conversation with an old friend. You know their voice by heart, the inflections and rhythms that you could pick out of a noisy room even without being able to hear any specific words, but the conversation itself is anything but […]

The Descendents have been making music together for four decades, taking breaks now and then so lead singer Milo Aukerman could attend college and focus on his career as a research scientist. In 2016, Aukerman announced that he was finally leaving the world of academia for good in order to focus on making music full […]

Since their inception in 2010, the New Orleans sextet known as Naughty Professor have been blowing away live audiences and winning scores of new fans with their eclectic brand of funk-infused jazz. With two studio albums and one live recording under their collective belt, Naughty Professor recruited a host of talented collaborators for their new […]