Steadfastly political and occasionally amusing (as on “Homophobes Are Just Mad They Can’t Get Laid” and “Degrassi Junior High Drop Outs”), these Canadian anarchists were one of Fat Wreck Chords’ first bands, and have been plotting their musical coup for more than a decade. After two albums, the 1997 departure…
Growing up in Chicago, Kaskade was initially into British New Wave acts such as The Cure and The Smiths before discovering clubs, Frankie Knuckles and house music. You can hear it in the melancholy groove of his deep house tracks, echoing the Brits’ love of Northern Soul. Kaskade began spinning…
Gorgeous bluegrass shaded with a blend of contemporary pop and rock influences, the San Diego trio Nickel Creek’s supple, earthy tones blow gracefully across genre-bending arrangements. Their new album, Why Should the Fire Die?, transcends categorization, and while it doesn’t fully break with their Americana pedigree and the style of…
Arriving on the heels of the Get Up Kids’ success, Saves the Day burst out of the box with 1999’s Through Being Cool, a terrific punk-pop album keyed to singer Chris Conley’s lovelorn croon. STD’s follow-up, 2001’s Stay What You Are, vindicated the buzz and set the stage for a…
If Kurt Cobain can get a hit musing about disposable teenage culture, why can’t a bunch of Swedish Marxists? If, as Marx suggests, communism is a post-capitalistic construct, then perhaps (I)NC is the tipping point. Formed around Dennis Lyxzn, leader of popular punk anarchists The Refused in the ’90s, the…
It’s been called dance music for people who like rock, but the tag’s too reductive. While The Crystal Method’s “big beat” sound has often featured a rock roar (including guitarists Wes Borland from Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello), it also accompanies layered loops of pop, soul…
For every hundred bedroom guitar heroes, there’s a Bryce Avary, the kind of driven kid who doesn’t just dream it. Avary recorded an EP at 18, setting the stage for his terrific self-recorded and -produced debut, Calendar Days, which generated enormous buzz for the then-20-year-old. Channeling the pop impulses of…
Bands change, fortunately, and so does the music they make. But that implies opinions must change, too. After describing MXPX as a pale Green Day imitation to the bass tech for MXPX’s front man Mike Herrera on this summer’s Warped Tour, a moment later, we were introduced to Herrera. Oops!…
Argue if you will about screamo’s artistic merit — if you were 16, growing up in an environment of Incubus and Limp Bizkit, you’d have a lot of outrage, too. Victory Records has emerged as the SST of this genre, which is to say that the Chicago indie’s got the…
You know the feeling in the air when the barometer and temperature drop as a big storm blows in? It’s like that around Jean Grae these days. Not that she’s suddenly materialized like a cold front. Grae got her start in 1997 with Natural Resource, when she was 16. She…
If his rhymes were weapons, he’d be a 30mm chaingun, eviscerating the landscape with enough unrelenting wordplay to make the New York Times’ crossword seem childishly quaint. Francis got his start slapping his salami on the counter (metaphorically), working the battle rhyme circuit, and beating down other MCs throughout his…
Please welcome tonight’s three contestants for accolades, riches and fame. From Los Gatos, CA, we have Dredg, whose meandering, oceanic compositions hint of ballad-oriented modern rock. The guitars swirl while singer/guitarist Gavin Hayes croons and swoons over the top like Matchbox Twenty covering Oasis. The band’s third release for Interscope,…
Caitlin Cary began playing violin when she was very young, but had let music lapse in favor of a creative-writing degree when she met Ryan Adams, who recruited her to play Emmylou Harris to his Gram Parsons in the band Whiskeytown. Her smoky alto had enough character to write its…
It’s feeling a lot like the early ’90s, with rock acts selling hundreds of thousands of albums on little indies, and the majors out in force with their bankroll-operated cherry picker. Coming out of the fertile Long Island emo scene, From Autumn to Ashes’ 2001 debut, Too Bad You’re Beautiful,…
Kieran Hebden secured a contract for his English post-rock band Fridge while still in his teens. With the money he would’ve used for school, he bought a computer, and, after dropping out of school, began composing music on it during his off time from Fridge. Influenced by the hypnotic avant-jazz…
Like his buddy Reverend Horton Heat or his inspiration Jerry Lee Lewis, Colonel J.D. Wilkes is pure showman (and he’s no more military than Heat is clergy). Wilkes leads the Shack Shakers through similar intersections of blues/rock/country/rockabilly, wielding the wheel like a man possessed. Holding on to the mic stand…
Boston’s Unseen exemplifies old-school hardcore, from its shout-along English Oi! roots to America’s machine-gun tempos, extending the legacy of classic Beantown forefathers Gang Green and Slapshot. It’s the sound of Joe Strummer’s “White Riot” roaring down suburban boulevards like a trench-coat mafia hopped up on piss and vinegar, looking for…
Some bands are fireworks, some wine. Some burn brightly and die quickly, others need time to develop their full bouquet. Ireland’s The Frames came out of the gate with a vengeance, led by the powerful, elegant voice of teenage front man Glen Hansard, who’d quit school at 13 and begun…
Barbez is a whirlwind of Old World energy, a picture postcard suffused with smoky moods and late-night cabaret. Like Gogol Bordello getting a makeover from the Dresden Dolls, Barbez mixes Eastern European folk styles from gypsy to klezmer with a Weimar/Kurt Weill fascination, and flavors the sound with a theremin…
Kool Keith is a hip-hop legend going back 20 years to rap’s early beginnings. The onetime Bellevue patient was a member of seminal Bronx group Ultramagnetic MCs before striking out on his own to forge some of the most outlandish rap characters in the pantheon — Doctor Octagon and his…
Being a good emo/pop-punk band these days is like being a natural blonde in a sea of peroxide. It’s easy to get lost in the waves, but these bands have distinguished themselves as two of the better acts in a crowded pool. Hidden in Plain View is a New Jersey…
The Posies loved Big Star so much that they became the band. Front men Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer became the backing for Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens when they reunited Big Star for the first time in 1993, and have just finished a new Big Star album with them…
