Two Snakes call its brand of music meat-and-potatoes rock, but that’s underselling it. Humble, yes, but there’s a lot more going on here, and it’s a joy to listen to hard rock that brings in equal parts intellect and aggression. Lead track “Alleys” zips to a start, boasting a burly guitar hook and bass riff […]
punk
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Hank airin’
Politics and social justice have never been too far from the mind of punk legend Henry Rollins, and the world of the Black Flag front man turned spoken-word artist plunges more and more into that realm as we approach Election Day on Nov. 6. Naturally, it’s become a chief point of discussion during this tour, […]
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Foreign Home — How Strange the Night
From the sounds of it, that’s a place where Tulsa outfit Foreign Home would like to call home. Its debut album, How Strange the Night, is big, layered, engrossing and just enough offbeat to not reside firmly in the mainstream. That can be a death trap for some bands who drown in that wall of […]
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Affair of the hard
Photo: Chris Hultner The usual suspects of street punk brought the guys behind Violent Affair together: The Unseen, Broken Bones, Krum Bums and so on. But when it came time to record the Oklahoma City band’s latest material — the recently released, two-song EP, A Call to Arms — the five-piece sought inspiration through Nintendo. […]
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Hostage situation
You won’t see Connecticut pop-punk act Hostage Calm refueling at Chick-fil-A on the road between gigs. The group’s guys are some of the most vocal supporters of marriage equality touring today, playing rallies, helping assemble a documentary on the movement and even selling merchandise that benefits organizations fighting for same-sex legal unions. “For my generation, […]
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The gap
Credit: Nathan Poppe Although less than two years old, the Oklahoma City Southern folk act Black Canyon already is a whole new beast. “Black Canyon has changed a lot over the past six months,” front man and founding member Jake Morisse said. “Things are getting a lot louder.” There’s a fairly simple explanation: Founding member […]
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Aw, Swell
Jonathan Weiner When Nick Diener and his brother formed punk act The Swellers as teenagers, they didn’t know what they were doing. “When we were kids, we had these guitars and we wondered what it would be like to be rock stars. So we formed a band,” guitarist and singer Diener said. “I didn’t know […]
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Kindest cut
Credit: Anna Lee As leader of the local post-punk outfit Paperscissor, Evan Crowley gets a little metaphorical when describing his band’s intense live shows, which have become a sight to behold. “A painter might know what they want a painting to look like, but they have these happy accidents along the way. That’s how our […]
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Anger management
Mike Ness has been guilty of many things — more than he’d like to remember, or even can remember — but holding back on his emotions isn’t one of them. As the singer, guitarist and all-around force behind the three-decades-strong punk band Social Distortion, the man has summoned plenty of personal demons in hard-charging, college-radio […]
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Brush with noise
Ross Adams James Hammontree, singer/guitarist for Paintscratcher, took a bad habit and twisted it into the perfect name for his then-fledging, Oklahoma City-based hardcore group. “The thing I used to do when I was nervous was scratch the paint of a windowsill furiously fast. I thought, ‘That’s a pretty good name for how I want […]