Ian Curtis

The Best Concerts In Houston This Weekend: Blues Control, Loretta Lynn, The xx, etc.

Blues Control Mango's, February 8 Blues Control's Lea Cho and Russ Waterhouse make a tremendous clatter with keyboards, guitars and synths. The Queens, N.Y., duo started grabbing cool-kid support way before last year's Drag City effort Valley Tangents, which built on their already kaleidoscopic bod ... More >>

The 5 Most Important Years In Goth Music: 1994

Over the course of the week Rocks Off will be looking at the biggest years for goth music and exactly what they meant for the genre. 1994 was a good year for a new kind of goth. Previously, for the most part the men had been sensitive artists, and even the ones who could be pretty brutal -- such as ... More >>

The 5 Most Important Years In Goth Music: 1979

All this week, Rocks Off will be looking at the biggest years for goth music, and exactly what they meant for the genre. Like any good structure, goth is built on the foundations of other previous cultures. You can walk back through David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and all the way ... More >>

The 20 Greatest Goth Albums: The Complete List

BY JEF WITH ONE F AND CHRIS GRAY 20. Marilyn Manson Antichrist Superstar (Interscope, 1996) So squalid and deeply unpleasant it's mesmerizing, Antichrist Superstar is such an intricate dissection of how to become a "rock star" it could have come from a biology lab. Then 24 or 25, Manson gets so fa ... More >>

The Top 20 Greatest Goth Albums of All Time, Nos. 10-1

BY CHRIS GRAY AND JEF WITH ONE F Rewind: The Top 20 Greatest Goth Albums of All Time, Nos. 20-11 10. Rosetta Stone The Tyranny of Inaction (Cleopatra, 1995) In 1995, Porl Young used a nice-sized record advance to purchase a multitrack digital recorder that changed Rosetta Stone's sound considera ... More >>

Happy Birthday, John Peel: Our 10 Favorite Sessions

Today would have been the 73rd birthday of John Peel, one of the planet's most legendary, eclectic and flat-out best radio disc jockeys of all time. He died in 2004, but the nearly 40 years of outrageously good music that he helped bring to the masses at BBC Radio 1 beginning in 1967 form a pretty d ... More >>

Happy Birthday Bernard Sumner: Our Favorite New Order Songs

For about the past month I have been in a New Order phase, which started in earnest the day that I picked up their 1993 documentary, New Order Story, in it's expanded form with a separate disc of all their music videos, at a thrift store. With lead singer and guitarist Bernard Sumner's birthday to ... More >>

Kanye West Saved By The Bell = Kanye'd By The Bell

​Today on Tumblr we found Kanye'd By The Bell, a site that links evocative Kanye West lyrics with screenshots from everyone's favorite high school saga Saved By the Bell. The site has five pages and counting of the adventures of Screech, Slater, Zack, Kelly and the rest matched with the most p ... 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 >>

Gothic Council Debates How To Rule Our New Planet

​After years of searching, scientists have finally discovered a planet that may be able to support human life. Gliese 581d, as it is known is 20 light years from Earth, and though it's just a bit on the cool side for comfortable human habitation, it looks like a pretty good bet that he planet ... More >>

How Much Damage Has Twilight Done To Goth?

evilpoppy.org.uk​In our last meeting, Gothic Council member Paul Fredric of Asmodeus X said the following... As a gothic union or lobby we'd definitely have a large stake in all things vampiric. How about a class-action lawsuit again the Twilight movies and novels for trying to misrepresent v ... More >>

The Seven Ages Of Goth

​This is not meant as a complete history of goth, as that would be a huge book. Instead, we're aiming to give a simple overview of the musicians, songs and albums that have most defined the genre. Many deserving artists have been left out, and some that we're sure some people feel are not wor ... More >>

The 31 Best Music Documentaries Of All Time

​Hands down, above all of these following music documentaries, Craig's Hlist's two favorite of all-time are The Decline of Western Civilization Part 2: The Metal Years, and The Beatles Anthology. We can watch both on repeat for days and not complain. That will probably all change once we see ... More >>

Last Night: The Black Angels And Black Mountain At Warehouse Live

Photos by Marc BrubakerSee more photos from Wednesday's fever dream in our slideshow.​The Black Angels, Black Mountain Warehouse Live November 17, 2010 Some music is so evocative and overwhelming it can cause you to flash back to before you were even born. Not all of it - when a Mozart sympho ... More >>

Fitzgerald's Reopens With A Hint Of Things To Come

Photos by Jim Bricker​For more photos from Thursday's reopening, see our slideshow here. "I want this place to be the nexus of local music. It's going to be the anti-Mangos," Omar Afra told Rocks Off as he points out the changes made to the second floor of Fitzgerald's on Thursday night as it ... More >>

The American

Turning the thriller inward.

Going Platinum: Artists We'd Pay $10,000 To See - And When

​It started one night on the patio of Big Star Bar in the Heights; over Lone Star and cigarettes, a handful of Houston music wags debated the shows they would pay top dollar to see from lartists, iving or dead. We argued the aspects of an At the Drive-In reformation, seeing Sam Cooke in 1963, ... More >>

Top 8 Post-2000 Soldier Songs

​Like many of you, Rocks Off has friends and family members who have served (or are serving) in our armed forces. Memorial Day is when we honor the sacrifice so many of them have made - and are still making - fighting America's wars. Songs about the hardships suffered by soldiers and their familie ... More >>

Rocks Off's 2010 Predictions: The Fate of Owl City, Chingo Bling vs. Chamillionaire, the Next Twilight Soundtrack and Madchester In Katy

www.flickr.com/photos/dherholz/​ Adam Young of Owl City will mystify the scientific community, yet surprise no one in the music community, when he is hacked in half in a freak sawmill accident, and it's discovered he is filled with gummi bears. The Arcade Fire/Flaming Lips feud is resolved when ... More >>

He Said She Said: Songs from the Year We Were Born That We Still Listen To

Yes, we are older than MTV. Shut up.​The thing that struck She Said most when researching this list of songs that came out the year we were born (May 1980) was just how much of this music we regularly listen to now. 1980 marked the end of disco, the middle of New Wave and punk, and a damn good tim ... More >>

The Horrors

He Said, She Said: Gone Too Soon

A rash of recent musical deaths (Michael Jackson and DJ AM among others) have led us here at Rocks Off to do some speculating of our own: Which musicians do we feel were taken from us too soon? Obvious answers like the Famous Js (John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin) or the dual ... More >>

He Said She Said: Breakup Songs to Help You Bawl, Part 2

Ever since men and women set eyes upon each other at the beginning of time, there have been break-ups, and painful dissolutions of romantic escapades have made the best art in the world. Hell, somewhere in the world there is a probably a cave painting of a pretty young Neanderthal girl with devil h ... More >>

Aftermath: SXSW

Bayou City Buzz

Houston's SXSW class — and we mean class — of 2009

2008 in Texas Albums and Local EPs

Aftermath: Ariel Pink & Haunted Graffiti, Chairlift, Wicked Poseur, Balaclavas and the Wiggins at Walter's on Washington

French Kicks: Swimming

Best Non-2007 Music of 2007

Control

Joy Division portrait proves the exception to the rock biopic drool

Joy Division's Expanded Reissues

Unknown Pleasures, Closer, Still, Control Original Motion Picture Sound Track

Drenched in Blog: Unknown Pleasures

Hooked Up

Playbill

The Fall, with Low Flying Owls

Sunday, May 2

Psychic Gothline

Find out what the late Ian Curtis thinks about Interpol. No, really.

New Order World

In dreary Manchester, a revolution spawned heroes, martyrs and, most of all, myths