The good news for NYC heavy rock fans is that St. Vitus is open again. The bad news is that there’s been a big bump in the cover charge, as you would expect from any club that passes the fees from online ticket middlemen on to their customers like the pizza places that use Uber Eats. So the twinbill with the thrash/spacerock/postrock hybrid Wizard Rifle and stoner riffmeisters Bongzilla will set you back $27. There are other acts on the bill, but these are the ones really worth coming out for, and the quality justifies the price. The album at the top of Bongzilla’s Bandcamp page is an old one ..read more

Has a heavy psychedelic rock band ever played Lincoln Center? Believe it or not, a few punk acts have played there over the years. There was a rare concert by a reconfigured version of legendary 70s Detroit band Death there in 2010, Six years later, Hoba Hoba Spirit – the Moroccan Clash – raised the roof at the atrium space on Broadway south of 63rd St. That’s where heavy spacerock trio King Buffalo are playing on March 30 at 7:30 PM. It’s a free show; you might want to get there early. Their new album Regenerator is streaming at Bandcamp. Whether motoring along at a fast autobahn clip or with ..read more

Hazmat Modine are one of the world’s edgiest and most enduring jambands. They got their start a couple of decades ago as a darkly oldtimey-flavored New Orleans blues unit which sometimes featured instruments as diverse as the Chinese sheng – a sort of hybrid harmonica/tuba – and the lowest of all low reed instruments, the contrabass clarinet. Charismatic belter and frontman Wade Schuman plays a mean chromatic harp, but he’s also a hell of an oldtime resonator blues guitarist. In the early days, the group’s signature sound was dueling blues harps; as the years went by, they went deeper into reg ..read more

What is up with this week? Suddenly it’s 2019 again. There are more great multiple-band bills around New York than there have been in, um, years. Wonder why that is? The best of the bunch is at Gold Sounds on March 18 and starts anticlimactically at 8 with psychedelic janglerock guitar goddess Barbara Endes’ band Girls on Grass, followed by cult supergroup the Elgin Marbles, who play the wickedly catchy, serpentine songs of bandleader/guitarist Dann Baker’s previous outfit, Love Camp 7. Up next are Canadian country crew the Pickups and then Cementhead, who enjoyed a good run (and a revolving d ..read more

Of all the extreme niche cover bands in the world, one of the best are Fuck You Tammy. The bandname is a reference to the most recent iteration of Twin Peaks. The group – a spinoff of the similarly cinematic but more techy Scam Avenue – dedicate themselves to playing music from every incarnation of David Lynch’s iconic film noir franchise: the first two network tv seasons, the brief cable comeback series and the Twin Peaks movie. They released their lone single so far, a lush but hauntingly intimate and psychedelic version of True Love’s Flame, in February 2020, barely a month before the lockd ..read more

Alice Lee released one of the most harrowingly memorable songs of 2020, Isolation Blues, singing through a surgical mask for added creepy effect. Her latest single is an equally haunting, absolutely gorgeous cover of a 1925 78 RPM single by Vernon Dalhart, The Prisoner’s Song, which was the first million-selling country music hit. She mixes found sounds from the subway, samples of Williamsburg churchbells and plays a banjo borrowed from the library for an immersive, drifting, feminist interpretation that’s part Sade and part Ma Rainey. You can hear the song at her music page. Proving that good ..read more

There’s an intriguing triplebill coming up at 8 PM on March 9 at an unexpected out-of-the-way spot, Main Drag Music at 50 W 1st St. at Kent Ave. in Williamsburg, where polymath guitar god Pete Galub opens the night, followed by a couple of anthemic yet acerbic and sometimes abrasive acts, Woodhead and Mustafina Galub is probably the only artist who’s played lead guitar for both Americana icon Amy Allison and art-rock mystic Carol Lipnik. But he’s also a solo artist who’s just as adept at straight-ahead powerpop as he is at psychedelia, a guy who can find the inner James Brown in Pink Floyd’s A ..read more

Ace Bandage are the best new jamband in New York. When they weren’t playing shows last year, they were improvising in their rehearsal room and putting that stuff up at Bandcamp. They recorded their latest short album, Ace Bandage’s Almost Halloween live at Hart Bar in Bushwick last October. You can hear the originals at the Bandcamp page; the whole concert, including Bowie and Pink Floyd covers, is available at archive.org. They make their way up from a minor-key reggae groove to a brisk mid-80s Talking Heads pulse in the first of their tunes, Weirding. Guitarist Jake Pepper plays purpose ..read more

On one hand, rock music in this city was pretty much snuffed out by the 2020 plandemic. But in the past year, there have been signs that we’re about to see a welcome resurgence. Many artists who were locked out of the number-crunching, social media-fixated venues are suddenly getting prime time onstage. And that almost invariably means that the music is good: these artists are writing songs and jamming out instead of spending all their time on the magic rectangle. One impressively eclectic bill is this March 4 at 8 PM at Alphaville, where brooding folk-rock tunesmith Peter Carlovich, a.k.a. Pe ..read more

For one reason or another, heavy rock was one of the last styles of music to reemerge in the wake of the 2020 lockdowns. Maybe because so much metal and heavy psych deals with dark themes, and those artists saw a scam and said the hell with getting on a real highway to hell? Whatever the case, Lucky 13 Saloon and St. Vitus are open again with some lineups to help us forget about the horrorshow of the last three years. One of the best triplebills of the year is happening in a couple of days on Feb 21 at St. Vitus. And as good as the later acts on the bill are – thorny heavy psych road warriors ..read more