Nine Inch Nails

Five Punk Goes... Songs That Don't Suck

Last time in our "things that don't suck" series, we looked at some educational songs ( ) that our children could learn from without being bored to death. This week, we're looking at the Punk Goes... series, and some of the worthwhile tracks to grab from the series. Punk Goes... has long been the ... More >>

Spotify Launches Traditional Television Ad Campaign This Week

Spotify is launching its first-ever advertising campaign this week, with an ad debuting tonight during NBC's premiere of its new season of The Voice, hoping to capitalize on music fans who haven't yet made the leap to streaming music services. The three initial ads are heavy on emotion and slow-mo ... More >>

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 >>

5 Bands Studies Show Make You a Bad Person

We've been hearing for years that rock music makes us bad people. We've heard it from our parents, from teachers, from those goody-goody kids at school. AC/DC has probably written at least 100 songs about the subject. But what if I told you that scientists in the Netherlands have proved definitively ... More >>

Six Songs That Should Be On Nine Inch Nails' Greatest-Hits Album

Recently Trent Reznor announced the reactivation of Nine Inch Nails as an active studio project, along with a greatest-hits record scheduled to be released in 2014 with two new tracks. Of course, as a major NIN nerd, this is exciting news. NIN hasn't released one single compilation CD in Reznor's l ... More >>

Welcome Back: 5 "Retired" Artists Who Have Returned

Retirements in everyday life are often final, rewarding caps to distinguished careers so that the retirees can pursue lifelong hobbies and ambitions. Alternatively, they move to Florida and join a country club. In music, however, retirements are often little more than an excuse to sell concert tick ... More >>

Top 5 Bands Influenced by Public Image Ltd.

Public Image Ltd will be performing in the Greater Houston area on Friday, tomorrow, and as previously mentioned here, their choice of Scout Bar out in Clear Lake is a little unexpected. Rewind: Talking Politics, and Almost No Music, With Punk Legend John Lydon For those who haven't heard of PiL, ... More >>

NIN's Broken at 20: The Movie Trent Reznor Didn't Want You to See

Fans of Nine Inch Nails and loud music know the story of the Broken EP, but for those less familiar, here is the Reader's Digest version: Upset with his record label Trent Reznor recorded, in secret, an album of loud aggressive rock completely unlike his first album (1989's Pretty Hate Machine). He ... More >>

Are These the Most Anticipated Albums of 2013? Seriously?

A Web site (magazine?) called Loudwire posted their list of the most anticipated rock albums of 2013. The first question we have is "anticipated by whom?" Because if the answer is "people who love music," then we've got some major problems here. 10. Motley Crue Really? The tenth most anticipated n ... More >>

The Rest of the Best: Houston's Top 5 Restaurant Playlists

The only times I notice the music in a restaurant is when it's really bad (Christmas music playing year round at Sichuan Cuisine), really out of place (Nine Inch Nails blaring out of the speakers at now-closed Tony Vallone joint Ciao Bello or Cannibal Corpse washing over the line of patrons at Amy's ... More >>

Phantom Museums: The Short Films of the Quay Brothers

A Showcase Of Inappropriately Dubbed Puppet Musicians

I spend an unfortunately large amount of time on two activities. No. 1, I am paid under the table by the felt lobby to promote puppet music. No. 2, I have an irresistible compulsion to ruin children's entertainment. It's not that I'm a bad person; it's that I'm a horrible person who must ruin all t ... More >>

The Jesus And Mary Chain Hitting Houston On March 13 During SXSW Swing

Known best for their 1985 album, Psychocandy, the Jesus And Mary Chain have been called one of the most influential British bands of the '80s. With the wall of crushing reverb, drenched in pop hookiness, their sound foretold bands like the beloved My Bloody Valentine, the cultish Black Rebel Motorcy ... More >>

Vinyl vs. Digital, a Side-by-Side Face Off

​With all due respect to my audiophile friends, the end-of-year sales numbers for vinyl albums (up 39 percent from last year) are still just a blip on the radar. Vinyl sold 3.9 million copies according to SoundScan and that is a formidable number considering it is quadruple over what it was ju ... 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 >>

Friday Night: AWOLNATION & Wallpaper At Warehouse Live

Photos by Mattthew Keever​AWOLNATION, Wallpaper Warehouse Live August 5, 2011 How can one appropriately describe AWOLNATION? Truthfully, we're still asking ourselves that very question this morning. And we haven't made too much progress since Friday night's sold-out show at Warehouse Live's s ... More >>

Lost '90s Songs Houston's The Zone Should Play

​A few weekends back, Craig's Hlist spent his whole weekend driving around town running errands listening to 106.9 The Zone, Houston's newest "alternative gold" radio station. In those 48 hours, our entire adolescence flew into our ears, reminding us of most every good and bad moment, at least ... 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 >>

Five Songs That Huck Finn Guy Should Censor Next

gutenberg.org​As many of you probably already know, Alabama publisher NewSouth Inc. plans to release censored versions of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, replacing the words "nigger" and "Injun" with "slave" and "Indian," respectively. That's ... More >>

If Your Life Were A Movie, Which Song Would Be The Trailer?

​It started as a whim on Twitter, asking friends what songs would soundtrack the trailer of the movie of their life. Would their life's tale be a rollicking drug-fueled, love-filled adventure backed by the Rolling Stones' "Jumping Jack Flash", or would it be a morose and somber drifting story ... More >>

Top 10 Double Albums That Should Have Stayed Single

​Not all double albums should have been double albums, just as some albums had to be double albums in order for their point to be made. Each case is different with each band or artist. The Who's Tommy and Quadrophenia had to be double albums to tell their stories of teenage wastelands and po ... More >>

Ten Country Covers That Top The Pop Originals

​Our copy must still be in the mail, but Rocks Off figures we have heard enough songs from Jamey Johnson's new album The Guitar Song on Sirius/XM's Outlaw Country to know that we like it a whole lot. But none that we've heard so far are our favorite new Johnson song. It's close. No flies on G ... More >>

The Top 10 Rock-Musician Film Scores

​David Fincher's Facebook creation tale The Social Network has been the No. 1 film in America the past two weekends, and no doubt it will continue that streak this weekend, barring an assault by Jackass 3-D which comes out today. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone is already hailing Network as a ... More >>

Walmart's Greatest Hits... Or Maybe Not (NSFW)

​Growing up in Pearland, Craig's Hlist didn't know anything was inherently wrong with Walmart. We didn't see it as trashy. How could a place where we got baseball cards and metal magazines every Saturday be trashy? But when we got older and heard the tales of Walmart's wrongful business prac ... More >>

The 10 Most Fun Musical Instruments To Destroy

​A company in Japan is making disposable guitars expressly made for smashing. At around $60 a pop, you won't be too terribly sad about hacking up the stage with it or clocking your bastard bassist or dullard drummer over the head at the end of the gig. Hell, at these prices you could open the ... More >>

FAIL: The Entire City Of Seattle, Bachman Of BTO, The Scissor Sisters

​Seattle Knows How Great Music Is Made Three years after it was originally dreamed up, the Seattle Music Commission convened for the first time on Monday, featuring representatives from such musical mainstays as Starbucks, Amazon and Microsoft. There are also several record label reps on the ... More >>

Top 5 Bands That Should Relax For A Bit

Craig Hlavaty​Wednesday, Rocks Off got an e-mail from the Dave Matthews Band PR team saying that the group would be taking 2011 off so they could come back in 2012. Whether or not this is to hasten the coming Apocalypse that year or just to live a normal life for a bit remains to be seen. God ... 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.

Defending The Buzz: Does 94.5 FM Really Suck That Bad?

What with Creed reuniting, BuzzFest coming up in a couple of weeks and, hell, maybe even the swine-flu scare - As in: What's worse than coming down with swine flu? A Houston radio that only tunes in 94.5 FM - Rocks Off sure has been thinking a lot about The Buzz lately. Probably too much. I mean, it ... More >>

Mail Call: Post-AC/DC Edition

AC/DC may be gone (sniff), although the ringing in several of Rocks Off's friends' ears (and his own) lingers on, but the mail goes on... Waylon Jennings & the .357s (Littlefield/Nashville, R.I.P.), Waylon Forever (by request): "'I'd been playing my dad the music I was inspired by at the tim ... More >>

Aftermath: Nine Inch Nails at Toyota Center

Nine Inch Nails: The Slip

The Spread: Penthouse Club on Winrock

Review: Nine Inch Nails, The Slip

Genghis Tron, with Converge, the Red Chord and Coliseum

Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I-IV

Black Math Experiment, La Sed, MK Ultra

Drenched In Blog: Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails Cry "Freedom"

The Secret of NIN

Pop Rocks

Ten albums that'll snap and fizz in your ear buds all winter long

Trent Reznor, Supersize

Nine Inch Nails, live in San Francisco: Hilarity. Guilt. Nostalgia. BALCO.

Industrial Revolutions

When the synth dust settles, Nine Inch Nails is the band left standing

Local Rotation

Bamboo Crisis

Man Over Machine

Stabbing Westward masters the art of human noise

King of the Mild Frontier

Adam Ant is still dressed up, and now has somewhere to go

The Lame and the Great

Lists you've been waiting all year for, in no particular order

Halloween Hangover

NIN was an unexpected treat, but Hole was a sorry trick

Puke Sick

Thoughts of Sonic Youth, kid's shows and animal testing with sick body and warped mind

Press Picks

Nail Noise