A Perfect Circle

Getting to Know Nine Inch Nails All Over Again Through Ancient YouTube Footage

With the coming return of Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails to the touring and recording grind, fan excitement is at a high. It's almost as high as it was when NIN finally followed up the massive Downward Spiral with The Fragile double disc in 1999, or when they returned again six years after that for ... More >>

10 Songs Still Missing From Spotify & What You Can Listen to Instead

As recently mentioned, I'm a pretty big fan of Spotify. Speaking as someone who never got over getting burned by my purchase of Stroke 9's Nasty Little Thoughts I'm a big fan of having the chance to listen to a record all the way through before making a purchase. In their advertising the company i ... More >>

The 10 Best Houston Concerts of the Summer

How awesome was that cool front that blew through this past Saturday? Finally, your average Houston afternoon has gone from being a blast furnace to mildly toasty, while the mornings and evenings have become sublime. Hey, we'll take it. This must be what they call "fall," so it seemed like the perfe ... More >>

Last Night: Puscifer at Bayou Music Center

Puscifer Bayou Music Center June 27, 2012 Always making the most of minimalism, Maynard James Keenan, the mastermind behind Tool and A Perfect Circle, made the back of Bayou Music Center's stage his home Wednesday night, content to let the rest of his band stand and sit in the foreground as he stoo ... More >>

Puscifer

iFest: Top 5 Argentine-American Musicians

The Houston International Festival enters its second weekend tomorrow, with featured musical acts WAR, Joe Louis Walker, Seun Kuti & Egypt 80, Texas Tornados, Del Castillo, Steel Pulse and lots more. Although iFest's performers come from all over the world, all around the main stages will be the sig ... More >>

The 11 Best Female Rock Bassists of All Time

seanyseult.com​While there are and have been so many notable women in rock-and-roll, and we'd like to honor them all, we've chosen the specific starting point of recognizing rock's best female bassists. As a bassist, I looked up to nearly each and every one of these women as I learned the bass ... More >>

Libra Soul: The Singing Voice Of The 99 Percent

Photos courtesy of Aiton Extea/Libra Soul​Around this time last year, Rocks Off told you about a man named Aiton Etxea and his quest to find "reason-filled musicians" for the purposes of forming a band. His use of the term "reason-filled" caught our attention because we were regular trollers o ... More >>

Top 10 Musician WTF Hobbies

Zazzle.com​Musicians are weird. Well, the good ones, at least. It's a little-known, beloved factoid. While artists' news, drama, and private lives are sometimes aired to the point of over-saturation, it becomes more interesting when we learn relatively kept insight into their rockers' offstage ... More >>

ACL 2011 Rumors: Ten Bands Who Could Make The Cut

Marco TorresWill ACL close with classic rock again, like with the Eagles last year? Neil Young?​The Austin City Limits Music Festival's big 2011 lineup announcement is imminent, scheduled for May 17, and Rocks Off will surely be on top of the news after it hits. Last year we sat on the compute ... More >>

SXSW: Bun E. Carlos Chills At Club De Ville

Photos by Chris GrayBun E. Carlos warms up for Candy Golde's live debut at Club de Ville Friday.​When someone offers you a chance to talk to the hands behind the driving rhythms of "Surrender" and steady swing of "I Want You to Want Me," you take it. So Friday night, Rocks Off found ourselves ... More >>

Rocks Off's Favorite Shows Of 2010

Marco Torres​Editor's Picks: Mary J. Blige, Reliant Stadium (RodeoHouston), March: Exquisite. Beach House, Walter's on Washington, April: Can't hate on this one either. Magical. Wu-Tang Clan, Numbers, December: Against all odds, they brought the motherfuckin' ruckus.

Music's Top Five Hottest Trends For 2011

Photo illustrations by John Seaborn Gray​Every year-end Rocks Off prognosticates the likeliest trends in music for the upcoming year. So far, we've got a 100 percent success rate, although since the FBI made us take down all of our previous predictions, we have no way to prove it. So you'll j ... More >>

Exes On Tour: White Stripes, ABBA, Lindsey & Stevie...

​We're all familiar with the credo against intra-office dating, often crudely expressed as "Don't shit where you eat." Most of us subscribe to it, knowing the potential drama it could ensue. "How will this affect my work," we wonder. "What happens if we break up?" But all's fair in love and ... More >>

Last Night: The Cool Tour At Verizon Wireless Theater

Photos by Matthew Keever​As I Lay Dying, UnderOath, Between the Buried and Me, Bless the Fall Verizon Wireless Theater July 27, 2010 Tuesday night, Aftermath witnessed a few things we didn't expect to see: A lot of fans who were extremely drunk before the sun even set, the loneliest mosh pit ... More >>

Top 10 "Girls Gone Wild" Music Videos

​Saturday night, Girls Gone Wild will be at Scout Bar in Clear Lake looking for the hottest talent the Bay Area has to offer, or something comparable. A camera crew will be out there filming an edition of the video series, looking for "The Hottest Girl In America" at the venerable NASA-area ro ... More >>

Friday Night: Warsaw's Grand Opening Less Than Grand

Photos by Kendra BerglundAutomatic Thrill did their best to rock a sparse crowd Friday night.​Grand Opening with CoRE, etc. The Warsaw June 25, 2010 The Warsaw's grand opening on Friday night reminded Aftermath a lot of a trip to Super Happy Fun Land. On the one hand, some great bands took th ... More >>

Tool's Awe-Inspiring Stinkfist Belts Toyota Center

GroovehouseNo Tool photo approval = singer Maynard James Keenan, the last time he was in Houston.​"For the next two hours, nothing else matters," said Tool's Maynard James Keenan as his band launched into "Jambi" right after stirring the pot of the crowd with "Third Eye" from 1996's Aenima to ... More >>

Don't Start A Band, Unless You Have Some Clue How To Market Yourself

​ Rocks Off has been bad, very bad. In our last two "Don't Start a Band" blogs, we ragged on our bassist, our drummer and our guitarist. We meant it all in good fun, but we have yet to rag on ourselves, and that's just not fair. So here's to equality and journalistic integrity. We joined the band ... More >>

Dr. Strangelove

Tool and A Perfect Circle wouldn't work, so Maynard James Keenan channels his love of Hee Haw through Puscifer.

Tonight: The Entrance Band's Willfully Lysergic or Unabashedly Amorous Hash-Slinging

Sasha Eisenman​ There's some confusion, understandably, about exactly what Chicago's Entrance Band purports to be. Are they good-time classic-rawk hash slingers? Psychedelic adventurers? Protest-rock revivalists? The endpoint where bassist/violinist's Paz Lenchantin - she's done time with Zwan, Pa ... More >>

Pay for Play

Superstar session drummer and Dadaist marketing genius Josh Freese (Devo, A Perfect Circle, the Vandals) sells himself, his famous friends and all-you-can-eat shrimp at Sizzler to promote his new album.

Web Extra: Josh Freese for Hire

Courtesy of Travis KellerWith record sales plummeting and disposable income not so disposable anymore, musicians (along with everyone else) are going to greater and greater lengths to stay solvent. Still, drummer Josh Freese - a top L.A. session musician and former Nine Inch Nail, currently a member ... More >>

Maynard James Keenan, Rock's Most Unusual Winemaker

Ron NewkirkMaynard James Keenan Maynard Keenan has to be one of the most enigmatic and musically schizophrenic men in rock. A soldier in the U.S. Army in the '80s, Keenan did a four-year tour of duty and then entered civilian life. He met future Tool guitarist Adam Jones in 1988 and one year later, ... More >>

Metalocalypse: Getting to Know Scarlet Sins

[Note: this is the first entry in a partnership between Rocks Off and Houston-based metal Web site UNdergroWNd MiNdbloW. In the hot seat is all-female Toronto quartet Scarlet Sins. Enjoy.] My name is Chris, and I have a long ongoing love affair with music. Especially heavy metal, death metal, spee ... More >>

Tonight: Sleepercar at the Mink

Yesterday Afternoon: Westheimer Block Party at Numbers, Mango's and Avant Garden

Tool

Between the Cracks

Profiling local bands

Music Awards Survey

A rundown of every act on this year's bill