Mike Bennett reviews the latest from Ted Leo, The Arcade Fire, K-oS and Michael Carpenter. Mike also presents capsule reviews of releases by Kelly's Heels, Angie Heaton, David Dondero, The Grip Weeds, Phil Angotti, Travis Morrison, American Werewolf Academy, Nouvelle Vague, Raquel's Boys, American Music Club and a Beatles Tribute.

Gary Glauber reviews the latest from Bowman, Scott Murray, Jonathan Kuss & The Corporation, Farrah and Edmund's Crown.

Kurt Sampsel reviews a great reissue from The Other Half. Katherine Kim debuts with a review of the new Joss Stone.

Mark Sanders reviews releases by Snow Patrol and Tin Hat Trio. If you are a first time visitor, visit our About Us page. Click here for back issues.

__________________________________________________________________________

Greg Shaw: Pioneer, Architect, Mentor

by Mike Stax

With the death of Greg Shaw the world lost not only a pioneer of rock fandom but the chief architect of an entire musical universe, populated by innumerable bands, writers, fanzine publishers and independent label owners. Defining the boundaries of this universe would be an impossible task. The present day garage rock movement is just one of its most recent manifestations, but to call it Greg's biggest achievement, as many writers have done in the obituary columns, would be to completely miss the much larger picture.

The big picture was something Greg seemed to understand better than any other writer or scene-maker. When punk rock...

MORE >

________________________________________________________________________

Please Allow Me to Re-introduce The Rolling Stones and Their Rock And Roll Circus

by Gary Pig Gold

I think we’re more than all in agreement here that something very, very special took place during the middle 1960’s; a magical, monumental something in the air(waves) which gave rise to an undeniably positive socio-artistic upheaval courtesy of poets like Dylan, bands like the Beatles, filmmakers like Kubrick and, if I may push the issue quite thinly indeed, television the likes of Get Smart and Green Acres to boot.

Still with me? Good. For soon came a glorious peak -- roughly stretching from Pet Sounds through Sgt. Pepper, phonographically...

MORE >

________________________________________________________________________

Monkey Business (Wyncote) 1967

by Michael Lynch

History often repeats itself, and we seldom learn from it. But enough about the election.

You can fool some of the people some of the time. That's not only a famous quote by Abraham Lincoln or Bob Dylan, it's also one of the prime rules of commercialism. So when in early 1964 when it became obvious that three out of every four records sold were by those Mops (in some stores it was four out of four...probably even five out of four in other stores), a dozen or so record executives of tiny budget labels (what is a budget label? A label with a tight budget, that's what) all hit upon the same idea...They couldn't release Beatles records, of course...but what if they threw together some soundalike...

MORE >

___________________________________________________________________________

The World is Round: Radio, Schmadio: Part Two

by Alan Haber

Business kills everything. Even the hint of business turns the good into the bad and the bad into the ugly. Take the Internet, perhaps the most important technological and sociological development in recent memory (as if you didn't already know). If you've been surfing the net since the beginning, and by that I mean before browsers (yes, Virginia, there was such a time), you remember you paid, say, $20 a month for 20 hours of online time and visited such places as museums in far off lands like England, and navigated through them by typing text commands like the ones that fueled the seminal early computer games from Infocom, like Deadline and the original Zork.

Enter the browser, which

MORE >

_______________________________________________________________________

Further Observations of a Jangly Music Fan

by Eric Sorensen

With all the political hoopla now fading from the American media, residents in my area of the country (the mid-Atlantic) can "take a deep breath and relax" … and enjoy the mild, colorful autumn weather that we are fortunate to experience in November. As darkness occurs earlier with each passing day, it provides me with an excuse to go inside and sample the assortment of new pop discs that have arrived in recent weeks. Here is a brief summary of the new discs and tunes that have caught my ear this past month:

On a track-for-track basis, it's hard...

MORE >

_________________________________________________________________

So Much Music....So Little Time

by Kevin Mathews

Don't laugh but sometime at the end of this month, I will be conducting a night course on writing music reviews! Imagine, being made to talk about music for hours - pretty unbelievable, eh? But then I realized that I was about to transform my beloved hobby into work - meaning, that people were paying good money to learn from me and I needed to be professional about what I was going to present. Puts a different spin on things doesn't it? I'd like to think...

MORE >

_________________________________________________________________

Greg Shaw: The Father Of Rock Journalism

by David Fufkin

Most of you who read Fufkin every month are aware that the great Greg Shaw passed away in the last few weeks. This month, we also lost the great John Peel, another man whose influence affected so many lives.

For me, Greg Shaw had a real, tangible influence on my life. What I have done is collected some of the better links on the Internet following this piece. These...

MORE >

_____________________________________________________________________

Additional Writers Needed

We are looking for additional writers with significant working knowledge of at least one genre of music, past or present.

E-mail us for more information. Take out the no_spam so that all you are left with is fufkin.com. Spider programs harvest our address and the spam is unbelievable.

________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________

Thanks for visiting. Please explore, and we hope that you make us your virtual

Home.

________________________________________________

To reach any other page contained in this month's update on Fufkin.com, read the home page for the appropriate link and click on it. You can also search the site from any page using the search box located at the top of each page. Merely type in the word, phrase, name of the band, recording, name of the Fufkin writer that you are looking for or Whatever in the search box, and then click on "Search". If you would like to e-mail us, go to the About Us page for a list of e-mail addresses.

Go back to the home page by clicking here

________________________________________________________________