Legendary Italian garage band THE SICK ROSE have their classic second album reissued this month.
Formed in Turin in 1983, The Sick Rose were one of the best known garage revival bands on the European scene, contemporaries of US bands The Fuzztones and The Chesterfield Kings, Sweden’s Nomads and the UK’s Barracudas.
Taking its title from the MC5 song and featuring the indie chart hit ‘Double Shot’,
Shaking Street caught the band at their early commercial peak. The band took most of the 90s out before returning in the 21st century with renewed vigour and a string of new albums including 2006’s
PHOTO PROVIDED Personal Effects. One of Rochester’s gutsier and more exploratory outfits on the scene today is Margaret Explosion, a delicate free-form jazz group that takes its listeners on an almost narcotic journey. The music is dreamy and tactile; you can take a hit and hold it. Because the sound is created in the moment, no one song is ever given the same treatment twice. It’s beautiful and mesmerizing. But to fully appreciate the trippy transcendence of Margaret Explosion, you have to pause and give a listen to Personal Effects, the band’s predecessor. The similarities are there, but they’re fleeting. Whereas Margaret Explosion is rather unconventional, Personal Effects was a more straight-ahead outfit operating in an emergent, danceable era of music that embraced pop and new wave. You can hear these aesthetics in Personal Effec
Holly Cole S band makes an entrance at Harro East Ballroom during the Rochester International Jazz Festival, pre-pandemic, in 2015. For most of 2020, I’ve been working from a second-floor room at my house in Charlotte. Typing, doing phone interviews, waiting for a neighbor to finish mowing his lawn so I can record something for broadcast. October came and went quietly. For the first time ever, no trick-or-treaters showed up at our door on Halloween. October also marked my first-year anniversary of working full-time at WXXI. And doing the math on my fingers, I see that I have actually spent more days working from this room, rather than at my desk at 280 State St. because of the coronavirus pandemic, of course.