This week’s question is a simple but important one:

This past weekend, a few A.V. Club staffers headed to Chicago’s Douglas Park for Riot Fest, the marathon three-day music festival boasting approximately 90 different artists. And due to a variety of mitigating factors—family commitments, advanced age, a general dislike of crowds and heat—we saw only a fraction of…

Riot Fest is coming to Chicago in September, and while seeing bands like Nine Inch Nails, Queens Of The Stone Age, and the reunited lineup of Jawbreaker during regular festival hours is great and all, it’s not quite as exciting as seeing some concerts that stretch a little further into the night. That’s what Riot…

Earlier this week, Chicago’s Riot Fest announced its lineup for 2017, coming out swinging with the announcement that punk rockers Jawbreaker would be reuniting for the first time in 20 years. Now, the festival’s organizers have announced another treat for nostalgic music fans, releasing a list of bands—including …

Though this year’s Pickathon festival in Oregon won’t have a fictional Flaming Lips feud, its actual musical acts should be at least as entertaining as that Portlandia gag. Held every year at Pendarvis Farm just outside of Portland, Pickathon prides itself on being an “alternative to the standard festival experience,”…

You don’t have to be a comedian to win @Midnight. In fact, there are very few requirements for becoming an @Midnight champion; you just have to be the person Chris Hardwick screams “POINTS!” at the most, and, in the end, does anyone really want that? In any case, Dinosaur Jr. frontman J Mascis was the latest musician…

Rap-rock, nu-metal, rap-metal, shit-metal, douche-rock. Whatever variably damning epithet you wanted to call it (just don’t call it late for its shift at Lids), the hybrid genre broke out in the mid- to late 1990s as a cathartic, unintelligible yaaaargh youuuu reaaadyyyy against the increasingly strained earnestness…

When Dinosaur Jr.’s original lineup of J Mascis, Lou Barlow, and Murph was restored (after much fraught and remarked-upon time apart) and 2007’s Beyond was released, everyone who remembered the first three albums (Dinosaur, Bug, and You’re Living All Over Me) heaved a sigh of relief that blew the tall grass at the…

Power Hour distills musicians’ discographies down to one tight 60-minute set, picking the big hits and deeper cuts from across a career, looking both to define who the artists are and to serve as a killer compilation.

Every Friday, dozens of new records are released into the wild. Some make big splashes, and others sink almost immediately. For most music consumers, it’s almost too much information, and save for those precious few who spend their hours glued to reviews sites and release calendars, it’s hard to know what’s coming out…

If you’re living in Chicago right now, you can probably feel it in the air: Lollapalooza 2016 is a little more than a week away, with all the brain-bending intensity and worries that that implies. Will you be able to see Radiohead? Will Third Eye Blind play “Jumper”? Will this be your last chance to see LCD…

Dinosaur Jr. announced last month that it would be opening for Jane’s Addiction for a few shows this summer, as well as headlining Boston’s Living Colour Festival with the Los Angeles rockers. But if you were worried you wouldn’t be able to snag tickets to the handful of shows, or otherwise felt that you could do…

Even indie-rock icons want to drive the hatchback Car And Driver magazine has named one of its 10 best values. At least, that’s the message behind the hilarious picture a Volkswagen dealership in Northampton, Massachusetts posted to Facebook, in which Dinosaur Jr. frontman J Mascis poses with his newly purchased VW…

Lollapalooza starts in a few months, and now Jane’s Addiction has announced that it’s going on a quick tour before stopping in Chicago for the new, slightly longer and slightly more expensive version of the festival that its singer Perry Farrell founded in 1991. That makes this year the 25th anniversary of…

It was sometime around 1997 or 1998 when author and rock journalist Michael Azerrad was sitting at home watching a generic multi-part history on rock ’n’ roll. It was late in the evening, and the episode he caught detailed the history of punk rock—or was supposed to. But something was wrong. “It went straight from…

Recorded in just six days and boasting a relative simplicity and an arrangement largely limited to Barlow’s voice and accompanying acoustic guitar, Brace The Wave is all about honesty. This being Lou Barlow though, there are layers of overdub and guitar fuzz, so the honesty needs to be pried out of the mess every now…

The family of the late Mark Linkous has blocked a planned and crowdsourced Sparklehorse tribute album. The non-profit mental health organization Box Of Stars started raising money for the project in 2013 and had raised more than $46,000, none of which will be returned to the album’s supporters.

Further never became well known during its existence in the early ’90s, but it wasn’t for the lack of some great music. The Los Angeles band, formed by brothers Brent and Darren Rademaker, released numerous records, toured with Sebadoh (Lou Barlow was a vocal Further fan), and had an album reissued by Creation. The…

The music world has swirled and rushed around J Mascis since the mid-’80s, when he launched Dinosaur Jr., and though his music has dipped in and out of fashion, he has been massively consistent. The relatively recent Dinosaur reunion produced three solid albums, and Mascis has alternated those with solo material—and…

Lecherous Gaze guitarist Graham Clise has been busy lately in Witch, a stoner-metal outfit that counts Dinosaur Jr.’s mastermind J Mascis on drums. But Clise has found time to conjure forth a second album by his main band, Lecherous Gaze. Be thankful he did. Zeta Reticuli Blues—as heard on the stomping, sinister,…