“I may not have all the answers, but if we all work together as a family, the outcome will be better.” –Ruperto Estanislao
“I may not have all the answers, but if we all work together as a family, the outcome will be better.” –Ruperto Estanislao
SMALL also makes for another great entry for my favorite genre: bummer party punk. I’ve never wanted to participate in someone’s therapy session before. Even if I had, I wouldn't have expected it to be a celebration.
I first crossed paths with author/comedian/musician Chris Crofton when his band, the Alcohol Stunt Band, played with my band at a show in Nashville. Their lyrics to their song “Dickerson Pike” recounted an unintentional journey by some innocent young scenesters down what was known as one of the seediest drags in Nashville at the time. […]
This is the third book by Ian Svenonius I’ve reviewed for Razorcake and I’m starting to sense a theme in his writing. There’s a lot of academic-level thinking with a sense of, “Is he joking or not?” Against the Written Word is comprised of nineteen essays that cover such topics as Instagram, record reviews, the […]
“You spit on The Urinals” is a line from The Descendents “Tonyage.” That line and The Minutemen covering “Ack Ack Ack” was my early exposure to The Urinals. I didn’t ever want to be so uncool as to not know a band with that pedigree, so I sought them out. And it took a while. […]
The series-of-vignettes format is a fairly popular one for memoirs (Sean H. Doyle’s This Must Be the Place, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Mike Doughty’s I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound). Kathryn Scanlan uses it for her compelling novel Kick the Latch. It’s about Sonia, a girl who grew up in the fictional town/city […]
I have to say, this book had a few hurdles to get over in my mind. I don’t think I’ve ever met the author, Adel Souto, but I knew his name from my Miami days. I believe at one point he just used some numbers as his last name, so I thought he might be […]
If you think about it for a sec, being in a touring band is absurd. You and a bunch of people—hopefully people you like, though not always—drive around, loading and unloading heavy gear in a different town every night, intent on playing songs for a bunch of strangers. And that’s just the base level of […]
A veteran fiction author highlighting the Bay Area underground scenes, Jeffrey Vernon Matucha returns here with book one of two following a new punk character, Skye Wright. Skye is sober, working the program, taking care of a deceased friend’s cats, trying to rescue the addicts in her friend circle, and working her way up at […]
Osa Atoe’s Shotgun Seamstress anthology collects the back issues of her zine of the same name, which ran from 2006-2015. Atoe’s zine sought to carve out a space for and by Black punks—to connect, and to be themselves. Throughout, great interviews with bands and scenesters like Brontez Purnell, Trash Kit, Andrea Genevieve of Purple Rhinestone […]
When I first looked at the title of this full-color photo zine, I first assumed it was a call number—a reflex if your day job is a librarian. But through some online research, I learned it’s actually the average atomic mass number of silver. Which is fitting when you consider the cover, which appears to […]
Asymmetrical Anti-Media, also known as “The Review Zine that Loves Antiquarian Windmill Tilts,” is back with Issue #14, brimming with reviews. After briefly explaining in the intro that, “This issue is rather delayed, because I moved,” creator Jason Rodgers dives right in, cramming more than twenty-five reviews within the eight pages of this photocopied, black-and-white […]