The Witzard

LEKTRON, L-R: Matt Skiba, Atom Willard, Hunter Burgan, and Randy Moore (SOURCE: Facebook, photographer unknown) LEKTRON was born in a torrential rainstorm in San Jose, California on a fateful winter night. What started out as an excuse for Matt Skiba (Alkaline Trio, blink-182) to make some noise in a friend's studio quickly evolved into a Garage-esque Punk Rock band thanks to the recording prowess of Ryan Perras and the Black Belt guitar musings and structural sensibilities of Randy Moore (GET MARRIED, DOKI DOKI, Dan Andriano & The Bygones.) Moore actually works at Asian Man Records with owner and founder Mike Park. The three built the foundation for the songs "Dirty Jacks" & "She's A War" to be taken up by rhythm section juggernauts Atom Willard (Social Distortion, Against Me!) on drums and Hunter Burgan (AFI, Matt Skiba & The Sekrets) on bass. What started in the vibey confines of District Recording Studios in San Jose would be taken down to...

I'll never forget seeing The Gaslight Anthem at The Mann Center 's Skyline Stage in South Philly on a warm September 2014 night with my then-girlfriend Caroline . It was one of the first 10 dates of a 40-date jaunt across North America and Europe behind their latest album, Get Hurt , which little did we know, at the time, would be Gaslight Anthem 's final run before their 2015 indefinite hiatus . I don't believe we caught Against Me! but we did catch Jimmy Eat World 's phenomenal career-spanning set; to this day, I still recount how Gaslight 's set was and still is one my favorite performances I've ever seen—I previously caught a portion of their set at Metallica 's ill-fated 2012 Orion Music + More Festival —especially, since drummer Benny Horowitz had an unexpected "family emergency" and Against Me! 's Atom Willard learned the entire set in a matter of mere hours. It was a rather riveting, increasingly charismatic 20-song set f...