This is typically when Beck would hit you with a change-up — dim the lights, warm the milk, and go quietly into the darkness to follow the party-rock high jinks of Guero with an album more in keeping with his introspective side. And Nigel Godrich did produce Beck’s two most…
There is a street in Omaha called Happy Hollow. But the characters who live in Cursive’s Happy Hollow are fictional Middle Americans dealing with actual Middle American dramas in a tiny rural town where people aren’t particularly bright or wealthy. And because Tim Kasher grew up Catholic in a small…
The members of Psychostick are explaining how they came to pack a CD as crushingly heavy as We Couldn’t Think of A Title with lyrics weighing in on everything from itchy balls to beer and diarrhea when guitarist Josh “Special J” Keys comes clean about his deep respect for “Weird…
Boasting one of punk’s essential band names, The Vibrators played their first show 30 years ago, when punk was still a baby pulling the safety pins out of its diaper, supporting The Stranglers. By the end of that first year, they had a classic single out (“We Vibrate”) and had…
An ugly guy could do a whole lot worse than to surround himself with half-dressed hot chicks — one of whom breathes fire — if he’s looking for attention in an underground scene swimming in ugly guys putting a punk-rock spin on AC/DC’s greatest hits. Stick “Pussy” in the band…
Its title an obvious tip of the blue cap to the great Gene Vincent, Racin’ the Devil finds Lee Rocker stepping out from the shadow of Brian Setzer’s pompadour, planting his upright bass at center stage, and tearin’ it up on vocals. And the way he sings, you’d almost swear…
The goofy band name may suggest they have mo’ ‘fro than any hippie band since Sly dissolved the Family Stone. But even if that were the case, it wouldn’t be what ultimately separates the guys in Mofro from their jam-rock brethren. No, where these two really stand out from the…
In the opening track of What the Toll Tells, Adam Stephens of San Francisco’s Two Gallants plays the role of a murderer facing the gallows, yowling like a tortured young Black Francis over country-punk guitars while keeping counsel with the dead. He’s shot his wife and dumped her body in…
Let’s face it. Most singer-songwriter music is lukewarm high school poetry without the hooks and energy that seem to make the lukewarm high school poetry you get with Fall Out Boy — or even Ashlee Simpson — that much easier to swallow. Then, there’s James McMurtry. It’s not that the…
Should a plumber receive a royalty check every time a toilet he’s installed is flushed? It’s an interesting question, posed by Led Zeppelin biographer Alan Clayson as he mounts a defense of what others have characterized as outright theft in the Led Zeppelin: The Origin of the Species DVD (released…
Frank Black could be living the easy life, riding the public’s insatiable thirst for the Pixies through another big nostalgia tour. But he’d clearly prefer to be doing his own thing. Consider the staggering volume of solo material he’s been able to crank out since putting the Pixies back together…
There’s a goofy little beach scene on the album cover that could fool you into thinking these guys made a surf-rock record. But it’s nothing like that, really. Sure, they do a track called “Surf” that starts off as a shameless “Pipeline” knockoff, but before the song is through, they’ve…
Karen O, the focal point of any Yeah Yeah Yeahs show, works the stage like Iggy Pop in fishnets, a force of unnatural nature overdoing every gesture, every post-“Rock Lobster” vocal tic, until you’d have to be a fool to turn away. She’s part train wreck as performance art, part…
The most Elvis-like country performer since Elvis, Dwight Yoakam established his cred as a country traditionalist when he kicked off his first major-label release with a spirited cover of “Honky Tonk Man,” a Johnny Horton classic from the ’50s. Two great albums later, Yoakam topped the country charts with “Streets…
Not many kids can say their high school band touched off a major-label bidding war. But it was after leaving Radish in the lurch at 17 that indie whiz-kid Ben Kweller made good on the hype with Freak Out, It’s Ben Kweller, the first in a four-part series of increasingly…
It doesn’t sound like Murder Time. There’s no screaming. No tension. No sign of a struggle. The opening track, “It’s One Thing,” starts off sounding like the kind of thing old prog-rock bands were doing in the ’80s — big, dramatic keyboards offset by the muscular chunkity-chunk of metallic guitar…
You’ll find no hit singles as big as “Psychotic Reaction” or “96 Tears” in The Knights of Fuzz: The Garage & Psychedelic Music Explosion, 1980 to Now DVD (Dionysus), historian Timothy Gassen’s fanboy’s-eye view of the post-Nuggets wave of garage bands Little Steven’s always going on about. But it’s certainly…
It’s been 50 years since James Brown’s first professional recording, “Please Please Please,” became the first million-seller in one of American music’s most inspiring careers. But while the yearning desperation of his early ballads proved the kid could more than hold his own against the other soul greats, it was…
Van Morrison first made a name for himself at the helm of The Angry Young Them, as an Irish Eric Burdon blowing harp and spitting out the blues with a gritty authority that said he’d kick your ass if he were any taller. The liner notes in that first album…
Is Hank Williams III smoking crack, or are Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers truly, as III suggests, “the best damn band in America”? We have no firsthand knowledge, as it turns out, of what Mr. Williams does when he’s not making music, but we do know this: Th’ Shack Shakers have…
Considering the haunted after-hours vibe he kept returning to on last year’s critically acclaimed Forever Hasn’t Happened Yet, it may seem strange to find John Doe reissuing the far more raucous For the Rest of Us, a little-heard EP from 1998, as For the Best of Us, its outtakes only…
Britt Daniel fans who cut their teeth on “Girls Can Tell” and “Kill the Moonlight” may be shocked to hear how freely Daniel borrows from The Pixies and Nirvana on these first two Spoon releases, back on the streets for the first time since more than a handful of hipsters…
