Features / Regular Columns

In another of SPB's regular features, here's a guest column by New England-based rocker JJ Rassler. JJ covers record collecting, country music, bizarro taxi rides in Nashville and "Florida Bill". Read on for more from JJ. -- About 20 years ago, the record collector magazine of choice was, and to … Read more

Jeffrey Roy is busy. Check the link for his credits and you will see a vast list of projects. In this edition of “Beyond Casual Observation,” as with other entries, I talk to Roy to help round out the roles that audio professionals have in film. The similarities in sound … Read more

John Cate was born in Liverpool, England, to American ex-pats who settled in the Boston area. John formed the van Gogh Brothers with guitarist Paul Candilore in 1995. The van Gogh Brothers include Paul Candilore on lead guitar, Clayton Young on bass, Steve Latt on fiddle, pedal steel and mandolin … Read more

In the previous installment of Beyond Casual Observation, we visited with three films to briefly illustrate the pleasant entanglement of music and storytelling in cinema. By looking at three different films from different eras, we attempted to express the resonant value of sound in film. I have always been fascinated … Read more

Scene Point Blank’s latest column is more than a column about life as a musician. Yes, it is that, but we’re also debuting two new videos from Howardian – for the songs “Move Yer Butt” and “On My Honor.” Rather than use a feature as a pretext for a link … Read more

Afterimages Wreckages of the pastEternally damned to repeat it.Exploded views incinerated by the electricity of truthPierced by the arrow of time keeping everything from happening at onceWhile the tombstone is still blank, the chisel is already poised.Distraction and temporary relief running through the bottomless vessel of inherited emptinessTrite maxims of unconscious … Read more

There’s so much music released, whether physically or digitally, that keeping up with what’s going on becomes almost like a full-time job. There’s only so much one person can listen to and subsequently write about and so a lot of smaller releases may slip through the net. With Only Death … Read more

Welcome to the second instalment of Only Death Is Real. This time round we swing from power electronics to decaying cosmic black metal, giving equal coverage to EPs, full-lengths and splits. Click on the title and you’ll find yourself on the relevant Bandcamp page. Axebreaker - Brutality in Stone (Self-released/Phage … Read more

The third iteration of Only Death Is Real is perhaps its darkest yet. Oppressive black metal and frozen winds all feature with the common thread being that the music here has all been released independently or by the artists themselves. Dive in but don't forget to come up for air. … Read more

Choosing five releases for Only Death Is Real gets harder with each iteration and this fourth column was no different. The list grew greater each time I heard something great but I chose five releases in each column so far and I’m not one to break my own arbitrary rules. … Read more

Welcome to the first Only Death Is Real of 2020, which this time features music from all corners of the earth. The column is a little shorter than usual this time as a few releases are yet to be fully available on bandcamp at the time of writing and including … Read more

Robin Lane was born and raised in the music and entertainment world of Los Angeles. Her mother was a model and her father a songwriter and musical director for Dean Martin. I first caught her in 1978 at the infamous punk rock club the Rat in Boston when she fronted … Read more

Each and every week, Scene Point Blank receives hundreds (and hundreds) of submissions for possible coverage. Some of these are really cool (Beck’s collaboration with the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab), some of them are kind of odd (a one man metal group from Zimbabwe offering up covers of Haddaway’s “What … Read more

Well, the train wreck of 2020 is in the rearview, but I’ve collected another selection of submissions that Scene Point Blank received in the past year or so that were worthy of note and a bit off the beaten path. Full speed ahead: the good, the spazz, and the wtf. … Read more

At the midpoint of 2021, a year which has thus far brought both hopeful and more troubling signs for humanity, I’ve put together another batch of offbeat submissions sent in to Scene Point Blank. On to the weird, the wacky, the wonderful! Vitamin – Recordings 1981 I think the first … Read more

Thanks to insight from professionals in the field, and the freedom to explore the use of sound in film, Beyond Casual Observation has featured a broad look at the functions of a soundtrack in film. Soundtracks are defined literally as the track of all sounds, and more commonly as a … Read more

With startling revelations our systems of authority are thought to be illegitimate, God dies, and the state cannot be justified. The burden of life is too great as our knowledge of suffering increases, to the point where our beliefs crumble and our gods buckle. Beings as a whole take precedent … Read more

It is that time of the year again, that time of changes. The seasons change. For some reason I am much more aware of this when summer transitions into autumn than when winter becomes spring for example. It is like saying goodbye to warmer weather and saying hello to yellow … Read more

Last year was a strange year. A lot happened in my private life which led to me not doing as much as I wanted to do. Some negative, but mostly positive. However, no matter how positive the events were, it cost me a lot of energy. With my energy and … Read more

Let's have a chat about preaching to the choir. It's that thing where the message you are putting out there with your music isn't really getting past the people who may already know the message. I'm getting up there in my years and experience. By the time we started The … Read more