Jordan Pedersen is a ball of confusion (oh yeah). The video adaptation of the feeling when your checking account is single digits, of when you fuck up at your day job and are within spitting distance of the chopping block. Friends of the site Zilla Rocca and producer Blurry Drones (Martin Douglas) don’t wallow in […]

Yuppies and tanks, sharks and banks, odd birds with feminine grace. Cobb Salads. Zilla Rocca cracks wisecracks in code, hard-boiled tutorials courtesy of the noir masters. Roc Marci needed no pulp fiction. Hempstead offers its own education of broken glass, bricks and birds. Has-Lo operates on the beats, making guitars sound like swords being sharpened. […]

It’s like Yelawolf said: don’t be so easily impressed, in ’93 you had to rap. So my endorsement of Curly Castro came with reservations. I’ve watched the Philly via Bucktown rhymer go berserk live, seen him match Scribble Jam champ Nocando in a cipher, and enjoyed both of his mixtapes — but to use an […]

It wasn’t Odd Future ransacking Fallon, but this week quietly marked another milestone first for another gifted rap crew, when Zilla Rocca and Curly Castro made their debut on Philly’s NPR outlet, XPN.  Re-working songs from 2009’s “Slow Twilight” for the Key Studio Sessions,  the pair brought live guitar, deft flourishes, and a pinpoint refinement […]

Like a broken clock, Matt Shea is right at least twice a day. Not content with releasing one of the finest debuts of 2009, 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers followed it up last April with an arguably better EP. The brilliance of Broken Clocks is in the way it takes a panorama scope – with a greater […]

When it comes to the music industry, the wrong sales records are being set. Soundscan tabulates album receipts in steady decline since their peak in 2000 — a year when close to 800 million albums were sold. In 2009, the figure dropped to just under 400 million. This year, the week of August 8-14 witnessed […]

While it may occasionally seem otherwise, self-promotion is my least favorite task, which makes the notion of promoting shows anathema to me. However, I continue to do it because like the Mothers of Invention, I am only in it for the money. Sometimes, when all things are factored in, I can make $7 an hour. […]

Zilla Rocca doesn’t get angry very often.  He’s a peaceful bloke, who digs the Los Angeles Dodgers, Raymond Chandler, the collected verse of Dennis Coles, and the love a man has for a fine Cuban cigar.  But like most artists that matter, if you push him he wields a ferocious temper, which has manifested itself […]

The polarization between rappers and rock groups has always bothered me. Granted, one can interpret it as a wise conclusion gleaned from the Durst era, but I suspect otherwise. The last few years have seen arbitrary barriers between genres collapse, with hip-hop producers swiping samples from MGMT, Vampire Weekend, and Radiohead, Dame Dash and The […]

Nepotism bedamned, Zilla Rocca is the rap Tracer Bullet. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are proud too– mediums have been consulted.  The second and long-overdue video from The 5 0′ Clock Shadowboxers Slow Twilight is here. “High Noon” at 5:30 p.m. Download: ZIP: 5 0′ Clock Shadowboxers-Slow Twilight (Left-Click)