s a big band leader, Brad Cox never wanted to be in the company of totalitarians such as Joseph Stalin. “I want the band to be a return to socialism’s beginnings,” Cox says. That’s why, in 2006, he changed the name of the 14-member ensemble he had formed several years earlier from Brad Cox’s Big

n western Blue Springs, there is an ordinary home with an ordinary yard. And in that yard is a shed. With its rust-hued exterior, it seems no different from any other shed. But step inside and ye shall enter the Slowdown’s studio. Thrust within walls spattered red, green and brown are all the band comforts:

ast December, Vincent Galicia lost almost everything. Equipment worth $10,000 that he had nickel-and-dimed for a decade as a bricklayer — gone. The 27-year-old and a few friends had devoted four months to building a studio in a commercial district on North 18th Street Expressway. It was to be a sunshiny space in earshot of

igfoot death metal. As Troglodyte, a four-man band from Independence, Missouri, calls it: “neandercore.” Or music as primitive as a caveman ripping ass — artfully. “It’s its own brand,” says Ben Von Schiefelbusch, Troglodyte’s bassist. “We don’t write songs. There’s no preconstruction or preconceived ideas. They just happen.” Or do they? Among Troglodyte’s bigger hits

ive years ago, CES Cru was tag-teaming bad guys. The cover of the hip-hop group’s debut album, Capture Enemy Soldiers, showed Ubiquitous (Mike Viglione) and Godemis (Donnie King) basking atop a mound of corpses. On the cover of the duo’s full-length follow-up album, The Playground, which launched Friday, the two MCs are engaged against each