When I first got into Rush, my friend Derik Rinehart (now an accomplished prog-rock drummer) made me a tape from his LPs, with this on one side and Moving Pictures on the other. Of course, I played the hell out of both sides, and I probably liked Moving Pictures a lot more because it rocked, [...]

You know the old joke about MTV never playing videos anymore?  Well, MTV has recently posted a site (http://mtvmusic.com) that purports to serve up the entire archive of the station’s videography.  Some quick poking around shows that isn’t true, but there are a TON of videos on here that MTV probably played once a year.
For [...]

I’m surprised I didn’t throw this album out a long time ago. I’m not saying that it’s that repulsive, I’m just saying that it never really clicked with me, and it went away in a box for a long time, until
recently, when it popped into my head and I had to dig it out of storage to [...]

Check out this GNR classic on classical Indian instruments:

Hey Axl, maybe you can add another 60 layers of overdubs on a special edition Chinese Democracy using these dudes!

Look, I’ll start off the review by saying the obvious, and scaring off the 90% of you that just won’t get this album. First, this isn’t a Queensryche album. Second, it’s not even really a metal album. And if you best remember Tate as a guy racing through eight octaves of scales like an opera [...]

You can divide the history of Rush into different discrete eras - in fact, the band did a good job of this themselves by putting out a live album exactly every four studio albums, wrapping up their career into nice little leather-bound volumes of history that chronicled their change from a Zep Clone band on [...]

You know how now (with now being 2008), all of the major phone companies and wireless companies are merging together and buying each other out, so where before maybe you paid Southern Podunk Bell for your local line and ABC Wireless for your cell phone, and now you just make one check out to some [...]

Dream Theater has never been known to show up at a gig, play the songs from the new album, throw in a few old numbers, and call it a night. Similar to Frank Zappa, they’ve always been known for having a large amount of material available to play at shows, and they’re known to mix [...]

Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy released a new DVD on his web site. It’s a “drum cam” video from the 20th anniversary show they did at Radio City in 2006. It includes alternate audio tracks for commentary and a drum-only feed. You can buy it at his site:
http://www.mikeportnoy.com/ProductCart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=35
There’s also a trailer available [...]

After the 1988 release of Operation: Mindcrime, Queensryche weren’t in a position to put on a lavish stage show or three-hour
headlining concert yet; in fact, they spent their time opening for Metallica on the epic …And Justice For All tour. (Unfortunately, they were only on the first leg of this tour; by the time I got to [...]