Sophomore Slump or Comeback of the Year?

Whoa boy, what a week, right? Beyonce! Justin Timberlake! Fall Out Boy! Destiny's Child! My Bloody Valentine! Over the last few days our ears have been blessed with new releases and reunions from some buzzworthy artists who couldn't keep loyal and patient fans waiting much longer. From full-albums to music videos and concert appearances, 2013 Music already feels epic, and the year has barely begun.

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Reid Haithcock

Back in 2007, when Long Island-based sorta hardcore band Crime in Stereo decided to call their third record ...Is Dead, it seemed to foreshadow an event that would happen sooner or later. Any fears were pacified at the time by the band sticking to its regular touring activities and issuing another record in 2009, but it wasn't long until the prophecy was finally fulfilled.

On August 9, 2010, a Facebook/Twitter update from the band declared, "Crime In Stereo Is Dead (2002-2010)"--a particularly cruel twisting of the knife since the phrasing implicitly remind fans of an album whose songs they wouldn't be hearing in person anymore. Shortly thereafter, band member Alex Dunne issued a lengthy, vague statement discussing the breakup, and the five-piece scheduled a handful of final appearances. The last Crime show happened on their native soil at Bergen Point Country Club in January 14, 2011.

Then, on this past October 3, using one of the same social media outlets they did last time, the group announced, "Hiatus rescinded." Along with revealing information of note (they would start making new music immediately, they missed working together, they'd play a single show in 2012, etc.), they thankfully also had the sense to acknowledge how little time they spent in the grave. "We know," they wrote. "We were 'only' broken up for two years." It was some comic book death kinda shit, but really, quite the positive if you were familiar with how their arc was going before it was halted.

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Soundgarden: Back When They Were Young Pups

For a band of impressive magnitude -- an unholy sum of Chris Cornell's wails, Kim Thayil's strangely tuned, beautifully heavy guitar, and the Zeppelin/Sabbath-indebted rhythm section of bassist Ben Shepherd and drummer Matt Cameron -- Soundgarden's return from their decade plus absence has been kind of tentative. First some live shows, playing all the hits and dusting off a Badmotorfinger b-side, then a contribution to The Avengers. It took a year and a half of being into this reunion thing for Soundgarden to get blunt and definitive. We were introduced to their comeback album King Animal by way of "Been Away for Too Long," a song that awkwardly stampedes into a bland chorus repeatedly proclaiming they've, well, been away too long.

Soundgarden is both the '90s band you'd most want back and least want back, and kind of for the same reason. They left behind a pretty impeccable catalogue, and the prospect of these four guys making music together seems promising even if their genre has long since vanished.

Soundgarden perform tonight at Irving Plaza.

See Also:
- Q&A: Don Fleming On The Grunge Years, Courtney Love's Work Ethic, The Velvet Monkeys And Being Sonic Youth's "Manager"

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Brian Wilson's interview with the Voice's Stacey Anderson will appear in our June 8 issue, just in time for his residency at Highline Ballroom June 11-13. During the shows, the reclusive genius will perform last year's album of George Gershwin standards, Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin, as well as select Beach Boys hits.

While speaking with Anderson today, Wilson denied the rumor that the Beach Boys will reunite next year in celebration of their 50th anniversary, as reported in Rolling Stone and by the BBC.

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Earlier this month, the Voice's Philip Mlynar took a look at the dilemma faced by Slaughterhouse, the all-star underground rap crew recently signed to Eminem's imprint, Shady Records. Balancing their credibility with the profit-making aims of a major label might be tricky in the current moment, but, Mlynar argued, "Slaughterhouse are finally rolling with the right team" now that they're on board with Eminem and his crew. Today's announcement that Em and Slaughterhouse member Royce da 5'9" would revive their Bad Meets Evil collaboration--which was last spotted together on record in 1999--would seem to be the first piece of evidence bearing out that hypothesis.

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The prospect of post-blues dirge shredders Come reforming with all four original members didn't exactly trigger an earth-shaking ruckus akin to what ensued when Guided by Voices and Dinosaur Jr schlepped their "classic" lineups on the road. But the reunion of singer/guitarist/badass Thalia Zedek, fellow axe-grinder Chis Brokaw (also of slowcore purists Codeine), original bassist Sean O'Brien, and drummer Arthur Johnson (of Athens rascals Kilkenny Cats and Bar-B-Q Killers, respectively) has fire; throughout the band's existence, Come trudged on and killed it, deconstructing the blues through a dead-serious, cigarette-induced doom-n-gloom and releasing four LPs--including 1992's monolith downer Eleven: Eleven, still lauded as an indie-rock classic nearly two decades later--before disbanding in 2001.

The band made a triumphant return to the stage to celebrate Matador's 21st anniversary in Las Vegas last year, and they play New York this Saturday at the Bell House. We spoke to Zedek and Brokaw via email.

Recently, Sound of the City interviewed Matt Sweeney of Chavez and he raved about Come, saying you guys were the template for Chavez. Did you hear a Come influence in Chavez? Do you think those guys ripped you off?

Brokaw: I'm flattered, but I never heard it. I never thought they sounded like us at all. We were both trying to do something interesting with the two guitars-bass-drums set-up. It seemed like lots of bands at the time were.

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At last, some '90s/early '00s nostalgia we can get behind: the veteran Kent, Ohio guitar-rock quartet Party of Helicopters are reuniting this weekend to play their first two New York shows since breaking up in 2004. Allegedly it was a particularly grim show in the basement of the old Knitting Factory that year that finally persuaded guitarist and chief songwriter Jamie Stillman to split up the band; since then, there have been a handful of mostly Ohio-centric reunion dates (in 2007, 2009, and 2010), but they haven't returned here until now. In our humble opinion they sounded like a gang of angels shredding in heaven but many friends of ours have violently disagreed over the years, due in part to the dazed and kinda abstractly sexual behavior of frontman Joe Dennis. But no other band had a better way with melody; no other band could flat out play like these guys could. Here's what our pal Chris Ryan wrote about them in these pages back in 2001, the year they released penultimate album Mt. Forever:

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"I was there . . . at Le Poisson Rouge . . . in 2011." The utopian dance club Paradise Garage, ruled by legendary DJ Larry Levan with a velvet fist from 1977 to 1987, is perhaps the mother of all Aw Dude You Missed It NYC nightlife spots, its reputation among dance-music fiends undiminished and unassailable. "I once said that I was obsessed with the place but couldn't get my friends to come with me," noted Steve Lewis in BlackBook recently. "So I got new friends." Convincing your own friends to drop by the Paradise Garage Reunion Party will probably not be such a hassle.

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Crass in 1984. This photo was taken by a man named Trunt, of course.

See the update below...

It doesn't get any bigger or more important than Crass, the Essex-born collective that helped integrate radical anarchist politics with punk rock, a bond that endures--insofar as the genre does--to this day. Their records from the '70s and '80s are deliriously weird mixes of Dadaist poetry, militantly pacifist hardcore, bad jokes, and weird noises; like any band worth anything from that era, they survived prosecution from their own government and any number of bans of their records. The collective faded as a musical entity in the mid-'80s and hasn't been heard from much since, retreating to the Dial House in Essex, where various former Crass members have since come and gone, frequently while nude. Three years ago the band's Penny Rimbaud sat in on Japanther's Dinosaur Death Dance at PS122, declaiming spoken word poetry and smoking lots of weed. But that, barring a reissue here and there and performances by various affiliates (Steve Ignorant, the Crass Collective), has been it. Until now, anyway.

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See if you can spot this grinning blogger in the above picture. Photo by Keith Marlowe, via Brooklyn Vegan.

Beloved early '90s hardcore band Universal Order of Armageddon are resistant to the term "reunion" (according to drummer-turned-Del Posto pastry chef Brooks Headley, they prefer "money losing labor of love"), but whatever it was they did at Death By Audio back in July--their first New York performance in over fifteen years--was one of the best shows we've seen in 2010. Because the four members of the band are busy, successful people, we figured this wouldn't be happening again anytime soon, but it turns out we were wrong: UOA will reunite (ahem) for a couple more New York shows in January, at the Cake Shop and the sight of their July triumph, Death By Audio, on January 21st and 22nd. The Cake Shop show is with SOTC pals and fearsome Providence-based two-piece the Body and the recently YIMBY'd Orphan; the show on the 22nd, at Death By Audio, will be with Fight Amp and Trophy Wife. We emailed Brooks to find out what the deal was with the January dates:

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