dammit

Remembering Stiv Bators, lead singer of The Dead Boys, The Lords of the New Church and The Wanderers, who died on this day in 1990 as a result of a car accident in Paris

Queens haven’t fully abandoned brawn and ballast (combustible lead single “My God Is the Sun” is up to their usual paint-stripping standards), but those qualities are now being harnessed for greater emotional impact, particularly on the penultimate “I Appear Missing”. It's a power ballad that perfectly bridges the divide between Queens’ hard and soft extremes, pitting Homme’s crestfallen melody against a sleeping giant of a chorus that proves to be as raging as anything in the band’s repertoire; when Homme shifts to falsetto for the song’s calamitous closing minute, it’s less a show of cheekiness than vulnerability. Homme initially chose his band name to subvert the machismo inherent to hard rock and, more than any of their records before it, ...Like Clockwork feels like the ultimate realization of that mission. [Pitchfork]

In memory of the great Wendy O. Williams, songwriter, actress and lead singer of the punk rock band Plasmatics, born on this day in 1949, Webster, New York