Robert Ham

Plague Vendor Free To Eat When we interviewed Brandon Blaine for this year’s 100 Bands You Need To Know special, the Plague Vendor frontman admitted that when he started getting into music and performing, his focus was on hip-hop. It took some friends to convince him that he should be give singing a real shot. […]

Grieves Winter & The Wolves With the Seattle hip-hop scene being laid upon the blogosphere’s examination table thanks to the Grammy-winning domination of Macklemore, there’s going to be at least a dozen rappers turned over for inspection. Although he’s released four albums’ worth of material now, Grieves is going to be one such piece of […]

These New Puritans Field Of Reeds In interviews about this album, Jack Barnett, the leader of the ever-evolving musical project known as These New Puritans, bristles at the idea that Field Of Reeds could be considered a “contemporary classical” work. As he told The Quietus late last year, “When people say ‘classical music,’ I think […]

Billie Joe + Norah Foreverly With Green Day, Billie Joe Armstrong has achieved the rarified kind of success where the music industry will now indulge whatever pet project he puts his mind to. A Broadway musical based on one of his albums that will soon become a Hollywood movie? Done. How about releasing three albums […]

Bad Religion Christmas Songs EP There's a delicious bit of irony to hearing a band called Bad Religion singing with evident fervor, “Oh come let us adore him/Christ the Lord” as they power through a hopped-up of “O Come All Ye Faithful.” It's a contradiction that the long-standing Los Angeles-based punk outfit embrace as gleefully as […]

Sebadoh Defend Yourself For a project that began its life as a lo-fi home recording project for Lou Barlow and his buddy Eric Gaffney, replete with wretched sound quality and interstitial samples and bits of noise, it's strange to consider that Defend Yourself could be the messiest album of Sebadoh's career. It's not just the music […]

John Frusciante Outsides EP When it comes to the work of former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante, it's best to push one's expectations aside. The mercurial 43-year-old has been following his own disturbed muse since he joined the aforementioned funk rockers back in 1988. It's only through his solo work, though, that Frusciante […]

Crash Of Rhinos Knots Every genre under the sun eventually circles around on itself, ready and willing to eat its own tail, ouroboros-style. So, it should be little surprise that the ’90s strain of emo that had its nucleus in the Midwest is being re-injected into the world's main vein in a crystallized form. Which […]

Joan Of Arc Testimonium Songs No Joan Of Arc album is ever just an “album” anymore. These days, this ever-evolving collective usually write and record music with a broad or specific conceptual framework in mind. In recent years, that has meant anything from a wall-cracking live soundtrack to the silent film The Passion Of Joan […]