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| Monster Magnet4-Way Diablo | SPV December 10,
 2007 4:22:01 PM 
This little voyage to leader Dave Wyndorf’s private hell and back isn’t as big-boned as the Magnet’s hook-heavy 1998 classic Powertrip (A&M), but it is full of sonic pins and needles: guitar riffs that prick their way through the songs’ seams, churning rhythms that keep numbers like “You’re Alive” tilting and spinning, and textures that balance the psychedelic past with the stoner-rock present, a feat navigated artfully in a cover of the Stones’ “2000 Light Years from Home.” Some of the tunes allude to Wyndorf’s 2006 OD on prescription meds and his recovery from addiction, but overall this is still a soundtrack for a world populated by a cast of Hammer Film characters: lush, lustful, and lurid. Now straight and sober, 18 years, six albums, and two EPs into his Monster Magnet career, Wyndorf remains that world’s absolute master.
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							 Inside the prize-filled trophy home of a seemingly obsessive-compulsive contest enterer
  A do-gooder who recorded abusive Boston police officers was himself arrested under a controversial ‘wiretapping’ law
  That intoxicating smell, the siren-call sizzle — looks like pop culture has gone hog wild
  Never mind its tough-girl alt-porn feminism: SuicideGirls has already moved on to a new generation
  We already know about politicians’ capacity for coarse behavior. But how low can the press go?
  Body modification as art at the Peabody Essex Museum
 
				
					
					
							 That intoxicating smell, the siren-call sizzle — looks like pop culture has gone hog wild
  Is there one political story the press shouldn’t report?
  Dutoit and Elder at the BSO, Collage’s Berio, Boston Conservatory’s Turn of the Screw, and Kurt Weill at the Gardner and the MFA
  Body modification as art at the Peabody Essex Museum
  The right of a performance artist represents the rights of all Americans. Plus, an opportunity with Cuba.
  We already know about politicians’ capacity for coarse behavior. But how low can the press go?
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