David Dondero, of course, is not the first windblown wanderer seduced by the romantic allure of the road. As integral to the culture as the endless paved arteries crisscrossing between coasts coursing with this nation’s vitality, our itinerant nature has cast its story upon our land’s expansive canvas countless times…

Bands are usually one thing or another. They either rock out with roaring guitars, beguile you with catchy melodies or awe you with the majesty of rich, soaring arrangements. Heavenly States is rare in that they’re capable of all three. The San Francisco quartet’s self-titled debut is assured and well…

Slug, the rapper for Minneapolis hip-hop duo Atmosphere, bounces in a boozy strut, dropping dimes on the game and dismissing his fame, while making light of the strife he calls life. He takes a left where his peers go right, bypassing ego-rich self-aggrandizement because steady self-deprecation is his personal pique…

It’s difficult not to be struck by the similarity between Will Johnson and Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard. Both deploy their tender and wounded but still hopeful baritones within the hushed buzz of lo-fi environs, wrapping their oblique lyrical imagery around melodic tunes that seep melancholia like athletes drip sweat…

Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traveled 6,000 miles, braving starvation, frostbite and treacherous landscape to cross the continental divide on their way to the Pacific Ocean and back. In the minds of the modern indie-rock enthusiast, however, that’s nothing compared to the difficulty a darling of the genre faces…

While the music business goes about choosing its acts like a high school popularity contest, music’s ranks of losers, loners and sensitive souls continue to prove true art is borne of greater hardship than bad hair days and poor fashion sense. Looking more like members of the truckers’ local than…

It’s been a month to forget for the Dixie Chicks and for everyone else involved in country music radio. Owners of a No. 1 country single heading into March, the Chicks now find themselves in a shit storm thanks to that well-covered offhand comment about President Bush at a concert…

Art Alexakis isn’t a happy guy. He’s the poet laureate of falling apart, and his Everclear’s latest album, Slow Motion Daydream, is no exception. But while the bandleader’s hymns to broken souls (“Science Fiction”), disintegrating situations (“New Blue Champion”) and a world gone wrong (“New York Times”) tread a narrow…

Media descriptions of Dead Prez concentrate on their black nationalist agitprop, even while there’s ample evidence that Stic.man and M-1 have more generous souls and broader minds. On 2000’s Let’s Get Free, they championed a vegan diet (“Be Healthy”), lauded the wonders of good conversation (“Mind Sex”), and on “Happiness”…

Ah, payola, sweet payola, ’twere like you never left. Actually, it hasn’t, much to the chagrin of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin. Dating back to the 1950s when Alan Freed and other DJs took money to make songs hits, payola, as it’s termed, has taken on a new guise in…

Elvis Costello’s wit and word play have long established him as a preeminent lyricist, but surprisingly no one’s attempted to assemble a credible tribute to arguably the greatest songwriter of the last quarter-century until now, leaving his oeuvre mostly as untouched as King Tut’s tomb. With Almost You, the new…

Julie McLarnon’s debut full-length befits her Bridget Storm persona. Ms. Storm’s hushed girlish whisper presides over these elegantly constructed arrangements like a coastal depression. Loping along with understated majesty, her music recalls the hypnotic melancholia of Tindersticks, richly embellished with cellos and violins in broad brushstrokes. McLarnon, a native of…

The dissolution of Squeeze opened a new musical world for Glenn Tilbrook. Suddenly a solo artist, without a label, touring alone with nothing more than an acoustic guitar, Tilbrook hit the road as hard as at any time in his career, first plunging into covers, then supporting a solo debut,…

Bob is back. Don’t be scared — we’re not talking about Bob Bennett, Republican ideologue, or a freshly shellacked Bob Barker, but rather indie rock legend Bob Mould. Front man for seminal outfits Hüsker Dü and Sugar, as well as author of several terrific solo albums, Mould has enjoyed a…

At 22, Conor Oberst is probably too young to be locked into the expectations of a fan base. After all, most musicians of his age are only beginning to figure out what they want to express, and how they plan to go about it. But Oberst’s intensely emotional, confessional songs…

Watching contemporary “punk” bands such as Blink-182 is like witnessing the evisceration of a movement — its essence gutted and reduced to a few standard moves, no different from watching an overripe Mick Jagger, tongue over crusty lips, trafficking teenage rebellion when the closest he comes to it these days…

In the grand tradition of the wisecracking duo, Brett and Rennie Sparks guide the Handsome Family over cold, windswept snowscapes, replete with dogs, birds and the rest of God’s creatures. They mirror the stark, haunted visages of patrons at Snow White diners, the minds of tormented blind men, and universal…

In a culture so besieged by the conflict between art and commerce, it’s perhaps natural that the use of pop idioms is disparaged by the critical elite, anxious to protect their canon from dilution. Charlie Hunter has dodged such dismissive darts aimed at his eclectic jazz treatments, which have spanned…