November 29, 2012 – It's a cool November day as Bad Brains frontman HR descends the front steps of his brownstone apartment in the collegiate Baltimore neighborhood of Charles Village, which abuts Johns Hopkins University. The area is lined with trees still bearing yellow and orange leaves, but here to challenge the mundanity of this otherwise average fall day is one of hardcore punk's most perplexing enigmas, a man who once leapt from a stage onto a young Henry Rollins, inspiring him to become a singer; a man who once smoked weed with a teenaged Brooke Shields; and a man whose chameleonic vocal delivery proved that punk frontmen could be more than just screamers.Today, this man, whom the government knows as 56-year-old Paul Hudson, is as mild as the breeze.

November 27, 2012 – The way the frontmen of psychedelic metal heavyweights Neurosis tell it, making records is a mercurial process. There may have been a five-year gap between their last album, Given to the Rising, and the aurally nuanced monsterpiece that is their tenth LP, Honor Found in Decay, but some of the new songs had their genesis in the mid-2000s.It's a similar situation when Neurosis vocalist-guitarists Scott Kelly and Steve Von Till reveal their influences, many dating back to the group's early days as hardcore shit-kickers in the late '80s, and still informing them today. "We were teenagers when we started," Kelly says. "We weren't thinking about it then, but the bands who influenced us were leaders and not followers. They didn't give a fuck about what people thought.

November 19, 2012 – With lyrics comparing cops to Klansmen, a free-noise breakdown, and a bridge containing "FUCK YOU" repeated no less than 16 times, rap-rock agitators Rage Against the Machine didn't expect "Killing in the Name," the first single from their self-titled 1992 debut, to be a hit. And it wasn't. At least not in the United States, where a choppy, radio-sanitized edit and gritty live-from-the-pit clip failed to get its radical fusion of metal, rap, and sci-fi guitar wonkery on any chart. But in post-Sex Pistols, post-KLF Europe, where both radio and video outlets embraced the whole "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" thing, it was a tour de force, even reaching No.

November 14, 2012 – See our gallery of Soundgarden's King Animal show here.To celebrate the end of the torturous 6,020-day wait between Soundgarden releases, the onetime Seattle-based alterna-metal-punk-grunge-whatever quartet played a record-release show at New York City's Irving Plaza last night. The Mesozoic wait didn't matter much, though, at least not to the 1,000 or so fans who were lucky enough to acquire tickets to the show (or were blessed enough to have $150 to satiate the scalpers outside— where's Mike Damone when you need him?). Many of the concertgoers were singing along to every word of Soundgarden's just-released King Animal. Throughout the night, superfan Taylor Hawkins of Foo Fighters, who watched the show from behind the mixing desk, kept a bestial beat, drumming one arm on the other.

October 10, 2012 – At some point during the past few decades, the remaining members of Led Zeppelin started acting pretty punk-rock. They play only when they want, they give cool, cheeky responses to reporters who ask about the prospect of upcoming concerts, and, in their most recent act of insolence, they waited five years to release a film of what was likely their final performance. (Don't like the way they do things? Too bad.) The flick, Celebration Day — which documents the 2007 London concert the band played in tribute to Atlantic Records cofounder Ahmet Ertegun — will screen in cinemas beginning on October 17 and will be released on DVD on November 19. Even the film itself is no bullshit, save some arty Instagram-like shots.

October 3, 2012 – The opening declaration of Gary Clark Jr.'s forthcoming album, Blak and Blu, goes, "I don't believe in competition, ain't nobody else like me around." The lyric draws from the years the prodigious vocalist-guitarist, now 28, spent woodshedding his mix of guitar-heavy blues and expressive soul on indie releases and the Austin, Texas, club circuit, where he says "everyone is a guitar player" showing off. He claims he has tried to avoid the scene's schoolyard-like one-upmanship, but when asked whether that lyric might be just him bragging, he says with a smirk, "I just genuinely feel that way…so why not?"With that in mind, the past year has been incredibly validating for Clark.

September 13, 2012 – Chelsea Light Moving still felt like indie-rock auteur Thurston Moore's solo group at the quartet's first concert last night, his three bandmates keeping a watchful eye on him throughout their show at Brooklyn's 285 Kent. The ensemble has been playing together since at least January, when the Sonic Youth vocalist-guitarist began booking more solo shows than usual as has band's future became increasingly more uncertain. Since those gigs, the group — Moore, guitarist Keith Wood, bassist-violinist Samara Lubelski and drummer John Maloney — has earned the identity of being one of Moore's harder-hitting projects, by releasing guitar-heavy slow burners like "Frank O'Hara Hit" and the punky, walloping "Burroughs".

September 5, 2012 – Most prolific from the 1950s through the 1970s, this British movie studio is best known for reviving classic horror monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and the Mummy. Actor Christopher Lee, now of Lord of the Rings fame, starred as the monster in many of these, and composer James Bernard wrote some of its most memorably atonal scores. He once gladly told a journalist in 1955 that in the 20 minutes of music he wrote for Hammer's cactus-man flick The Quatermass Xperiment, there is "not a single tune from beginning to end." Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: Hausu

September 5, 2012 – The New York-based audio electronics company Lexicon released its first digital reverb processor in 1971, a piece of recording gear that replicates the atmospheric echo of environments as small as a bathroom and as big as the Grand Canyon. The reverb units they have created since then, one of which was designed by a nuclear physicist, have won awards (including an Emmy) and some of the recording industry's most influential names like Alan Parsons (Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road) and Ken Lewis (Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z) endorse their products. Panda Bear: My brother, right when I was starting to record songs, got a Lexicon Effects Processor. I was just playing around with it on headphones. Putting it on the reverb setting. And it was just like, Ohhhh yeah. I was so into singing through it. Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: Lightning Bolt

September 5, 2012 – Don and Phil Everly scored a No. 2 hit in 1957 with their second release, "Bye Bye Love." With a strum and a warm coo, the pair began a winning streak of early rock-era country crossover breakthroughs that emphasized their near-telepathic vocal harmonies and sparsely textured guitar interplay. The influence of songs like "All I Have to Do is Dream" and "Cathy's Clown" appear in the vocal work of the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, R.E.M., and of course, Animal Collective. Avey Tare: Songs like "It Only Costs a Dime." I always like the way their voices blend and mash together so well. It's always been something we're shooting for during the recording process, just trying to get the voices to blend that way. It's just the way that their voices match. It's that one unified sound, to me, and you don't think of it so much. Same thing with the Louvin Brothers, you know?