It’s been awhile since Olivia Newton-John won a Grammy — 1984 actually — but crusading spirits do prevail. At age 58, she is prevailing her way across the States, promoting breast health and singing the standards that brought her international fame. She’s all about health nowadays, after surviving breast cancer…

The great cultural seesaw between New York and Miami tilts southward, sending one of the Big Apple’s icons sliding into Twilo, fittingly enough. The transplanted superclub, nixed during Rudy Giuliani’s near-thorough cleansing of high-end places that tend to dump heaps of bloody MDMA casualties at emergency room doors, will be…

Of all the cameos on the Teddybears’ Soft Machine full-length, Neneh Cherry’s “Yours to Keep” read-through is the Abba-est. By the coda, she’s so enchanted with the thing’s happy-ass-ness that she breathes a satisfied, geeky “yeah!” as the final sound. These guys have quickly become more important to TV advertising…

With the a-for-anarchy branding still legible on their pocked backsides after 30 years, the grandmammies of chick-punk return to recite the dub lessons that reggae producer Dennis Bovell beat into them during their brief fling with Island, which ended after their angry round-filing of the label’s highly round-filable memo about…

No new hamster-wheel-metal earth scorched here, but the mixture is high-octane if anyone is still living and dying by this genre. Unleashed is a black-metal band in a death-metal body, singing like pirate-oafs and pretending to admire Mastodon’s riffing here and there but forever falling back to Bathory-style three- and…

In space no one can hear you be hip, thus it’s probably a blessing that the Low Frequency cultured its sound in Haugesund, Norway, likely as close to space as it gets. Despite the muffled, Unwound-like vocal production, the group can’t hide its bubble-radio training wheels. There’s fighting Norse blood…

Irony of ironies, Al is a well-established entertainment brand himself, fat and tough-looking nowadays, so when he gives “Dontcha,” “Float On,” and Weezer’s “Beverly Hills” a simultaneous Sledge-O-Matic-ing from his accordion in one oh-the-humanity medley (“Polkarama!”), you sort of have to picture Kip from Napoleon Dynamite doing an Al imitation…

These days everything punk comes in Sam’s Club sizes — numbers of bands at shows, for instance — and at count-em-27 songs, drummer Marky Ramone’s Start of the Century two-CD set includes Ramones covers and pretty much everything the Intruders ever put on tape in the Nineties. Rancid’s Lars Frederiksen…

It’s not often you’re handed the opportunity to receive some express dentistry while giving to charity. Spikefest is a gig to benefit Dirty Rotten Imbeciles guitarist Spike Cassidy, whose recent colon cancer diagnosis (and possible metastasis) eighty-sixed a 2006 tour. While on forced hiatus from D.R.I., drummer Rob Rampy has…

Women are positioning themselves to stick it to men once and for all. Not content with bum-rushing the academic world by earning degrees, females are targeting anything considered male-sacrosanct, including prog-metal. Under the constant threat of being completely written off as the dumber sex, men must start to enhance their…

Even more bliss-driven than last year’s Mysterioso?, Totimoshi’s new record is reflective of the band’s recent road haul, which probably would have made for good reality TV — with the bandmates’ Halloween-mask-fetishism, semibabe bass player, and creative raps they must have devised to explain to hicks that no one in…

Taught to Be Taut Ska. Go ahead, laugh if you will. Much like a current genre label of the same length (hint: It begins with e and ends with o), it quickly became a musical four-letter word as soon as it appeared on mainstream radar. But something like Darwinism applies…