Mongo Nation

City turns on Hollywood staple “The Knitting Factory”

By Jeremy Azevedo

In a move that is sure to please no one, the city of Los Angles is cracking down on music venues that they deem in violation of their “Conditional Use Permit”. First to come under fire: popular club “The Knitting Factory” in Hollywood.

The Knitting Factory in it’s short history has not only single handedly brought positive change to its part of the neighborhood (the former slum at Hollywood and Sycamore, now a lucrative business mall), but has become a standard bearer for great live entertainment. Not only is it possibly the best suited venue for all-ages shows, but it’s also perhaps the only good reason for Los Angeles residents to ever venture west of La Brea into a generally touristy area with little else to offer non-tourists.

What purpose or benefit could there possibly be for the city to turn on The Knitting Factory? To make room for more overpriced condos that won’t sell, or maybe a restaurant that will change ownership three times a year at the expense of thousands of musicians, fans and local residents? I’m not sure I can follow the logic, but what I can do is let Knitting Factory VP of National Operations Morgan Margolis tell you in his own words what’s going on and what you can do to help:

“Dear Friends of The Knitting Factory,

I’m writing this letter to garner support for an upcoming public hearing by the LADBS (Los Angeles Bldg. and Safety) against our venue on Thursday July 17th 2008.

The Los Angeles Building Department is aggressively trying to revoke our CUP (Conditional Use Permit), for those of you who don’t know, a CUP is the conditions that all Restaurants, bars, clubs etc must run under in order to keep their doors open, if you lose your CUP, you are essential closed for business. After eight years in a crime riddled Hollywood corridor, the LADBS and vice, states that our venue is a “nuisance” and we do not comply under “upscale restaurant guidelines” (nonsense, food is always served and continues service and will someone please define “upscale” for me). They are also trying to say we do a steady stream of Erotica here, which is absurd, as we’ve only had 3 Adult Entertainment parties over 8 years and 10,000 shows.

Bar owners beware; the city is on a major crack down for what they deem CUP violations.
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A darker & more polished offering from an underground favorite

By Jeremy Azevedo

Alkaline Trio has always been known for combining gothic melodrama with hard-driving punk, a combination that has long pleased the elitist music underground. On their new album, “Agony and Irony”, Alkaline Trio has tipped the scales a little bit further into Smiths territory than their more hardcore punk fans will probably appreciate.

It’s probably a smart decision though, because crust punks aren’t exactly known to purchase a lot of albums, and Alkaline Trio has greater expectations to live up to now that they’re on Epic records, with Josh Abraham (Slayer, Linkin Park, Atreyu, Pink, etc.) producing.

So… Agony and Irony is not a particularly upbeat album, but I’ll be goddamned if it isn’t catchy as hell anyway. Not since The Cure has a band been so adept at making such miserable subject matter sound so poppy. Most of the songs here are real finger-snappers, despite being all about sadness and death. It’s like Alkaline Trio is the evil twin of one of those corny pop punk bands like Angels and Airwaves or whatever band those vapid dorks from Blink 182 are in these days.
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CraveOnline Soundcheck featured Artist!

By Jeremy Azevedo

Simply based upon their appearance alone, it would be easy to write Pierce the Veil off as just another cookie-cutter emo band. Like most people over the age of 25, I see tight pants and scene haircuts and I immediately recoil as a result of being assaulted with a decade’s worth of lame guitar pop and whiny lyrics.

After listening to their new album, A Flair For the Dramatic and meeting the band personally, I can safely say that Pierce the Veil possess a style and spirit that places them head and shoulders above their peers.

Hailing from a generationally musical family, brothers Vic and Mike Fuentes clearly exhibit a wide range of styles that range from screamo and melodic hardcore to punk rock, early Michael Jackson era funk, Spanish guitar/Flamenco and even a little bit of shred metal. Every song on the album is widely varied, not only compared to its neighbors, but within the actual songs themselves. The changes in style and tone are masterfully arranged in technically complicated patterns that mimic the climax and catharsis of life in a way that “emo” music is always expected to and yet often fails to.
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A Billion good reasons to see the new Futurama movie

By Jeremy Azevedo

I never thought I would see the day that Japanese tentacle porn made its way into mainstream American television programming, but here it is before my very eyes…

“Futurama: The Beast With a Billion Backs” is the second feature length episode of a four part series that will in turn be broken up into twelve separate episodes and broadcast on Fox next year. Sounds confusing, I know, but try not burn out your meager attention span trying to think about it and let’s just focus on the matter at hand.

The first installment of the new Futurama series, “Bender’s Big Score” was somewhat plagued by the “Look at me! I’m back on TV!” syndrome that plagues shows that go through lengthy periods of seemingly permanent hiatus. While longtime Futurama fans surely enjoyed it immensely, it maybe tried a little too hard to cram too much self reference, too many cameos and too many inside jokes into it’s meager run time. Plus there were those intolerable musical numbers… But there was a lot of Bender, which is never a bad thing, so we were essentially off to a pretty good start.
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CraveOnline Soundcheck featured artist!

By Jeremy Azevedo

Shapes of Race Cars is an independent indie/glam rock band you and your lady-piece can both agree upon. Lead singer/songwriter Dylan Champion has managed to combine the Sunset Strip cock rock swagger that you probably like with the pretty-boy pop melodies that your girlfriend (and the radio) loves.

The end result is kind of like listening to a mix tape of The Hives most spastic garage rockers mashed together with The Fray’s minimalist ballads. This may sound like an incongruous combination at first, but by the second half of the album it becomes apparent how well the different stylistic approaches compliment one another.

As an album, “Power” starts out strong with the title track, also called “Power”, a clever and catchy rock song about greedy willful women. The next few tracks shift gears into a mellower style before jumping back into rock mode with the crowd-pleasing sing along “Sound the Alarm”. The last song on the album, “Apocalypse Hurts” is a vintage-y John Cougar Mellencamp style rocker that is the polar opposite of the song that started the album out, which just goes to show how versatile the band can be.

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As in, more than usual…

By Larry “Stretchnuts” Johnson

Every night, when I read myself to sleep with the newspaper that I sleep under as a blanket, I see the same complaints: Everybody bitching about the recession, high gas prices, failing economy…

And I’m like, are you serious? You think you have it tough? Try being homeless these days; it’s a real sonofabitch!

Number 1 Reason Why it Sucks to Be Homeless These Days: ATM cards

Up until the mid/late nineties, people used to carry this green stuff called cash with them everywhere they went. Credit cards had been around for awhile already, and ATM cards were becoming more and more prevalent, but at that time ATM cards weren’t good for anything other than getting more cash out when the bank was closed. Almost every bar, liquor store and restaurant in the city was “cash only.” It was like a smorgasbord!

Panhandling was at its peak in those days. Why, back in ’93, I must’ve been pulling in anywhere from five to six hundred dollars a day on my lunch break alone! I was at the height of homeless fashion, washed up in the finest restrooms, had teeth made out of diamonds, a solid gold shopping cart, a thoroughbred feral street Chihuahua, and all the rock I could smoke! Nowadays I’m lucky to scrape up enough money for a nickel bag of paint fumes!

This is like, my dream right here!

Number 2 Reason Why it Sucks to Be Homeless These Days: Bottled water

Remember back before you could buy a bottle of water for two dollars at the supermarket? You used to be able to drink it for free on every street corner in America back when we used to have these things called “drinking fountains”. I don’t know if the bottled water companies asked to have them removed or if they just got taken away because of disuse, but just you try finding some clean water to drink in the city these days! The only upside to it is that you people generally throw away half drank bottles, which we can then finish and also recycle the bottle. So I guess it’s not a total loss, but once again, your convenience is our inconvenience, you pricks.

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Your guide to the painfully unnecessary!

By Jeremy Azevedo

As further evidence of the impending apocalypse, nary a week goes by that my eyes and ears don’t writhe in agony after being assaulted by the latest horror bestowed upon us by the entertainment juggernaut that rules our world with a tastelessly bejeweled fist.

Not content to keep this unwanted knowledge to myself, I have instead decided to share it with all of you so that you can share in my indignation!

Beverly Hills Chihuahua

This may be the most pandering, obnoxious, racially insensitive, and useless “comedy” of the year, on top of being at least five years too late, if not more. Basically, “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” consists of a bunch of Mexican actors (George Lopez, Selma Hayek, Paul Rodriguez, Andy Garcia, and Drew Barrymore as the token “cracker”) spouting off stereotypes while animated dogs prance around rapping about being “hot” dogs. I cannot begin to imagine how it escaped Disney’s notice that no one has given a crap about Chihuahuas since the “Yo Queiro Taco Bell” commercials stopped running and all the celebrities flushed their Chihuahuas down the toilet and got Puggles or some other stupid trendy dog instead.

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Night of the Chicken Dead!

By Jeremy Azevedo

Friday Night Midnight Movies is an irregularly occurring feature whose purpose is to showcase little-to-no budget films that play at late night theaters in the slums of America and the bombed-out megaplexes of the former Soviet Republic Eastern Bloc!

To simply describe “Poultrygeist” as “just another zombie chicken picture” doesn’t really do it proper justice. The latest in a long line of bat-shit crazy Troma pictures by the ubiquitous B-movie pioneer, Lloyd Kaufman, Poultrygeist is like the “Citizen Kane” of undead fast food revenge comedy scat porn musical horror movies. If there was ever a doubt in your mind that Kaufman had another film in him that could stand next to such classics as “The Toxic Avenger”, “Class of Nuke ‘Em High” or “Sgt. Kabukiman: NYPD”, then you would be very wrong, sir.

Poultrygeist tells the story of a lovelorn young man, Arbie, that gets caught up in the conflict between a fast food restaurant, the spirits that inhabit the Tromahawk Indian burial ground upon which it’s built, and the protest group known as the Collegiate Lesbians Against Mega-conglomerates, or C.L.A.M. for short. After being spurned by his one-time lover, Wendy (who has become a lesbian hippy after only one semester in college), Arbie retaliates by getting a job at American Chicken Bunker, the restaurant that Wendy and her butch new girlfriend are so vehemently protesting.

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Beautiful songs for ugly people!

By Jeremy Azevedo

The June free MP3 roundup this month is so baddass, even Skeletor is bumpin’ it whilst chilling on Snake Mountain, plotting his latest minion dishwashing schedule or whatever the hell it is that he does when not trying to take over Eternia…

And since there is nothing more metal than a blue-skinned leather daddy with a skull for a face that sits on a thrown made of monster bones, I’d say that’s a fair endorsement of this month’s hardcore selection! (But the hipster tracks are pretty good too!)

FRENCH KICKS are so precociously indie, you’ll be surprised that they didn’t record the whole “Juno” soundtrack themsleves! These guys have great potential to be the next big indie rock success.

Abandon

Candlewax Records CEO, founder and producer BLAKE9 is well versed in old school and future school techniques, combining styles like a good bartender combines liquor, serving up a stiff glass of shut the f**k up so overrated pricks like Kanye can solemnly drink it up, knowing full well that their rhymes could be tighter…

Always Something

CLINIC has been around for awhile, and has never really achieved breakout success despite massive critical approval. That has never stopped the press from trying, though, so here goes again: Buy a goddamn Clinic album already! What’s wrong with you people?

The Witch

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