David Ensminger

The Best Concerts In Houston This Weekend: Black Angels, Soundgarden, Hall & Oates, etc.

The Black Angels Fitzgerald's, May 24 Austin's Black Angels, with a band name pulled straight from the Velvet Underground's catalog, and a high-contrast image of Nico splayed across their logo, are unapologetic in their admiration of the prophetic NYC rock band. The Angels, though, have carved out ... More >>

Your 2013 Houston Record Store Day Rundown

Your financial situation be damned, Record Store Day 2013 is coming this Saturday, April 20, to drain your wallet of life and those little green pieces of paper. This Saturday your dance card should be full with all the major indie record stores in Houston and the surrounding areas offering up giv ... More >>

Bring Your Black Flag Tattoos to Vinal Edge This Saturday

Saturday afternoon at 5 p.m., tattooed Black Flag disciples are encouraged to stop by Vinal Edge in the Heights for sweaty fellowship with their fellow "barred" brethren to celebrate the release of Stewart Dean Ebersole's Barred for Life: How Black Flag's Iconic Logo Became Punk Rock's Secret Handsh ... More >>

The Best Concerts In Houston This Week: All Local Edition (No Foolin')

DJ Sun The Flat, April 1 Now that some of the well-deserved publicity surrounding DJ Sun's first-ever full-length release, One Hundred, has subsided a little, his true accomplishment on the disc seems even more impressive. In the span of 70 minutes, he pours his 20-plus-year career as one of Housto ... More >>

Hates Singer Looks Back on 35 Years of Houston Punk Rock

As the singer, guitarist, and chief songwriter for the Hates -- Houston's most enduring punk rock band and a local institution -- Christian Kidd (nee' Christian Arnheiter, Christian Oppression, and Christian Anarchy) has seen a lot. And with the band nearing its 35th anniversary (with Kidd as the ... More >>

10 Cool & Cheap Weekenders: November 9-11

Glass the Sky Fitzgerald's, November 9 Glass the Sky has been around about a year, but consider Friday's show a coming-out party. According to bassist and vocalist Michael Mazzella, the five local musicians had been playing in other bands for years and gradually realized they were going through the ... More >>

Island Reunion

5 Great Songs by Psy Besides “Gangnam Style”

ZZ Top Sucks. There, I Said It.

Friday Night: OFF! At Warehouse Live

Photos by David Ensminger​OFF!, Cerebral Ballzy Warehouse Live October 14, 2011 Some bands drag on for years, featuring only one original member, desperate to remain potent and pitched forward. Making potboiler punk, they endure the glare of the social-media era and endless new generations of ... More >>

RIP Mydolls Guitarist Kathy Johnston

Photos by David EnsmingerThe Mydolls' Dianna Ray and Kathy Johnston at Rudyard's, July 2011​Sometimes people come into our lives with the force, elegance and nimbleness of water. Musician, photographer, and patient advocate Kathy Johnston, the Mydolls guitarist and percussionist who passed awa ... More >>

Punk Rock's 10 Most Potent Women

David EnsmingerExene Cervenka at Cactus Music​Women are the resilient backbone of punk, providing creative DNA for the movement since the "zero hour," including Houston's own MyDolls and members of AK-47 and Bevatron, among others. Up 'n' comers like Vivian Pikkles keep the faith as Zipperneck ... More >>

Four Artists Who Died Before Playing Houston

theindependent.co.uk​When Amy Winehouse died Saturday, almost everyone noted how the troubled British soul singer had joined the "27 Club," the list of legendary musicians who passed away at that age that also includes Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, ... More >>

Rocks Off's Punk Professor Pens Vitriol-Filled Book

​To a casual viewer, punk rock flyers and gig posters can be as violent, messy and discordant as as the music they advertise. But to David Ensminger, who's been these paper artifiacts since at least the 1990s, the flyers are a part of the history and folklore of the punk culture. His new book, ... More >>

Anarchitex: Welcome To The Digital Dark Age

"I find I don't use the word 'fascist' as much as I did when I was younger" ​There's little your humble narrator can add to the exhaustive work our own David Ensminger did on the elusive Anarchitex, something of Houston's best-kept punk secret, and his in-depth preview of the band's new album ... More >>

Last Night: Peter Case At McGonigel's Mucky Duck

Photos by David Ensminger​Peter Case McGonigel's Mucky Duck June 28, 2011 Surviving 40 years of rock and roll is not nearly the same as embodying it, preserving artful, poetic, and transcendent song forms that persevere as the world unveils socio-political and cultural shifts, religious uphea ... More >>

Saturday Night: TSOL At Walter's On Washington

Photos by David Ensminger​TSOL Walter's on Washington May 7, 2011 In the dramatic, razor-sharpened lens of TSOL songs, suburbia is far from a sleepy wonderland bedecked with slick malls and coiffeured lawns. Those tracts of same-samey homes are chock-full of demons such as singer Grisham hims ... More >>

TSOL: This American Demon Could "Taste The Blood"

Photos by David Ensminger​Jack Grisham, singer of beach boys gone berserk TSOL, is a tour de force of American punk history still operating in full-bore form. His new memoir, An American Demon, which surveys his cataclysmic youth and early career, is not for the timid and meek. Like a meld of ... More >>

Last Night: Agent Orange At Fitzgerald's

Photos by David Ensminger​Agent Orange Fitzgerald's January 9, 2010 In the 1987 21 Jump Street episode "Mean Streets and Pastel Houses," fresh-faced Johnny Depp goes undercover as a punk to root out vicious gangland teenage thugs lurking in the inner city. He ends up at a rowdy punk concert r ... More >>

Agent Orange Continues Carpet-Bombing Surf-Punk

David EnsmingerAgent Orange's Mike Palm at Rocbar earlier this year.​Rocks Off recently had the opportunity to speak with Agent Orange's Mike Palm, who founded the Southern California surf-punks in the late '70s and has remained in the trenches ever since. Agent Orange plays Fitzgerald's Sunda ... More >>

Saturday Night: The Adolescents At Walter's On Washington

Photos by David Ensminger​The Adolescents Walter's on Washington January 1, 2010 In a revealing scene during the seminal punk documentary Another State of Mind, Minor Threat plays a show to a swelling and heaving early 1980s crowd in Baltimore. The P.A. system was yanked away by worried sound ... More >>

Friday Night: Batusis At Mango's

Photos by David EnsmingerCheetah Chrome​Batusis feat. Sylvain Sylvain and Cheetah Chrome Mango's December 10, 2010 "Everything was as it always had been ... the years were a mirage and there had been no years," E.B. White once wrote, describing the collapse of time. This is what Batusis effor ... More >>

Peter Case benefit

Smoking, Metal Detectors, Drug Sweeps and Houston Pavilions

The Ban and Business

Minibill