Another Technicolor Teeth gig, another few frequencies closer to complete hearing loss. And once again, it was worth it. The Appleton trio celebrated the vinyl release of its Teenage Pagans LP and supported Philadelphia’s

 While they get plenty of hype, people seem to find a lot of reasons to dismiss Wavves—the grungy California garage outfit led by Nathan Williams—portraying them as drunken louts whose rapid rise to notoriety must

Seattle was all the rage for a few years in the early '90s-until Kurt Cobain killed himself and people realized that most of the "grunge" acts signed in the wake of Nirvana's success sucked. Sonic Boom: The History of Northwest Rock, from "Louie Louie" to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (Backbeat Books) is a reminder that grunge wasn't the region's first contribution to rock'n'roll...

In the last two years I've interviewed a trio of grunge veterans�Chris Cornell, Gavin Rossdale and Scott Weiland�and all three struck me as sad, albeit in different ways. Chris Cornell was friendly, open and chatty, and also remarkably defensive. Unprompted, he floated an absurd theory about why the reception was so cold to his crappy 2007 solo album, a scattershot set of overproduced s...