Tonight at the Bowery Ballroom, the Afghan Whigs—the Cincinnati torchbearers for damaged soul music—return to the stage after 13 years on hiatus, and if their performances on last night's Late Night With Jimmy Fallon are any indication, tonight's sold-out show will be full of the band's trademark self-lacerating fury, with Whigs frontman Greg Dulli leading the charge as he spits out twisted tales of love gone spoiled. In advance of the band's return, which includes a Whigs-selected lineup at this fall's I'll Be Your Mirror festival in Asbury Park, I spoke with Dulli from his home in New Orleans shortly before he left to rehearse in Cincinnati with his bandmates; the parts of our chat that didn't make it into last week's Voice are below.

More >>

A few drinks into my conversation with Mike and El-P about their new collaboration R.A.P. Music (Williams Street), the tone shifted, as it tends to under the influence of multiple makeshift White Russians. EL-P's drink-ordering became relentlessly efficient. Things became a little more candid. The conversation veered on-and off-record, and, by the time the night was over, they ended up "covering" almost everything. From the fate of HBO's Luck to the future of Earl to what El-P originally thought of Jay-Z, here are the (publishable) highlights of The Drunken Reel.

More >>

This week the Voice sat down with New York jazz titan Charles Gayle, whose new album Streets portends a man on a quest to find peace within his craft and headspace. Gayle and Tom Surgal (of local avant-jazz stalwarts White Out) go way back to the revered '80s downtown era, and the percussionist, via email, reflected on their history together. "In many ways, I've always thought that Charles's life mirrors the life of Coltrane, in that he too was lost and then he was found," Surgal said.

"Charles was floundering in his earlier life, leading a dissolute existence, and then he experienced a spiritual awakening and he was saved. And like Trane, his playing began to reflect the new found intensity of a man on a righteous path. There has always been a sense of urgency to his playing, like he was making up for lost time. And also like Trane, he has always practiced relentlessly. I know people who used to live in his old squat who claimed he never stopped playing. A lesser-known facet to Charles's personality is that he possesses enormous curiosity about the human condition. He is always studying people and has keen insights in to the way peoples' minds work. I've always thought he has the intellectual predisposition more characteristic of an author than a musician. This stirring need in him to fathom those around him no doubt feeds in to the dimensionality of his playing, help making him the consummate musician that he is."

Here, Gayle delves even deeper into Streets and his inspiring trajectory.

More >>

Monster Magnet frontman Dave Wyndorf is a talkative guy. What was supposed to be a 30-minute interview to preview his band's performance of the 1995 album Dopes To Infinity at Music Hall of Williamsburg this Friday stretched into 90, as he took off and ran with subjects like how his band has been pinned down as "stoner rock," his experience with the heyday of big-budget music video excess, and the time he took the stage with his old pal Marilyn Manson. It would be journalistically negligent to leave out any story involving "BB machine guns," so here's a compilation of some of the interview's best outtakes.

More >>

Seze Devres / www.sdphotography.net

Bryan Kasenic (left); cake.

This week, the Voice profiled Bryan Kasenic, who throws the monthly Bunker party—the city's premiere techno event—which celebrates its ninth year tonight at Public Assembly with a bash featuring Chicago house legend Derrick Carter and Dutch techno great Legowelt. Below are some outtakes from our interview, in which Kasenic discusses his entrée to New York, the records that made him a techno fan, avoiding "amateur night," and not being the background to someone else's K-hole.

More >>

This week in the Voice I spoke to the surviving members of the New York proto-punk outfit Jack Ruby—as well as Teenage Jesus and the Jerks/8-Eyed Spy no wave icon Lydia Lunch—and we sifted through the drug and alcohol haze of 1970s and '80s New York City to find a few killer memories.

In these outtakes, Jack Ruby/James Chance and the Contortions bassist George Scott's roommate Gary Reese tells the tale of how he vigorously searched for the band's long-lost demos and rehearsal tapes, which were ultimately groomed for release on ugEXPLODE, run by Brooklyn's own terrorist musician Weasel Walter. (In early 2012, Jack Ruby will also be issued on wax via Feeding Tube Records.) Also, Reese, Lunch and surviving Jack Ruby members Chris Gray, Randy Cohen and Robbie Hall share memories of the late Scott and Boris Policeband.

More >>

Sebastian Slayter

In this week's Voice Michael Tedder profiles the Brooklyn trio Widowspeak, who craft hushed, gorgeous ballads and whose self-titled debut (Captured Tracks) is one of the year's standout first releases. Tedder trailed the band around CMJ, where they were one of the beneficiaries of the week-long music festival's hype cycle. His account is below.

At their best, Widowspeak achieve a state of cinematic grace. Grace is something that has fuck-all to do with the CMJ Music Marathon, and even fuck less to do with the music industry at large; Widowspeak is still getting used to this. Vocalist Molly Hamilton says the band has only ever done a handful of interviews and getting all the members in the same room for a photo shoot is always a chore. Even managing the band email can be problematic. But they signed up for this year's music meat-market anyway.

A week before the festival, the band members laugh off the suggestion that they might try to "win" CMJ and accrue buzz band status by playing as many high-profile gigs as possible. "We have nothing really to push," says Hamilton, noting that the band's policy is only to do what feels right. The members were wary of overdoing it and playing gigs in the double-digits like some upstarts, plus there were days jobs to think about. (Hamilton is a barista, guitarist Robert Earl Thomas a busboy.) But both were happy to play showcases for things they supported, like WNYU or NYCTaper. That added up.

More >>

In this week's Voice, we profiled the Rapture, recently re-signed to DFA Records. Luke Jenner, Vito Roccoforte, and Gabriel Andruzzi are voluble guys, so there was plenty of material that we couldn't fit into the story. Here are a few pieces from our interviews that touch on the band's early years, as well as the fraught making of 2006's Pieces of the People We Love.

More >>

In this week's Voice, we looked at the history of Archers Of Loaf, the storied North Carolina indie outfit that recently got back together for a run of shows and reissues. Below, some quotes from Archers frontman Eric Bachmann that couldn't fit into the Voice's print edition; members of Band of Horses, Les Savy Fav and the Hold Steady help restore the white trash heroes' proper place in indie rock's annals, too.

More >>