To look at him, you’d think Redd Volkaert would snap the neck of a Telecaster in half the moment he tried to get flashy with the left-hand arpeggios. He’s a big guy, Volkaert, with thick, tattooed forearms and fingers each about as wide as a single fret. But there’s nothing…

It may not have been an evil omen, or even anything so innocuous as a harmonic convergence. But the Figgs, without planning to, predicted their tour trouble in the very first verse of their new record. The New York-based Figgs open Sucking in> Stereo (Hearbox), their latest guitar-driven garage-pop outing,…

Oh sure, I hear you moan. And I’m the love child of George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Actually, the Bastard Sons, who hail from San Diego, are more like the kissin’ cousins of Dwight Yoakam; but as Minnie Pearl used to sing on Hee Haw, you’ll never hear one of…

Oh, my my. Oh, hell yes. The funky Meters, y’all. Sampled by Public Enemy, name-checked by the Beastie Boys, covered by Primus, joined by Dr. John and Paul McCartney, there has rarely been a group that so defined a single town’s sound the way the Meters did in the late…

Here is Jody Reynolds, circa 1955. Here’s this towheaded 17-year-old rockabilly player, good-looking fellow sporting a low blond pompadour and a guitar slung across his shoulders, playing at a little club in Odessa, Texas. Jody Reynolds is walking down a nighttime street with his buddies Al Casey, Billie Ray and…

Aijuswanaseing, the debut album from Philadelphia’s Musiq Soulchild, marks him as worth paying attention to, even if the record often slips a little too readily into contorted vocal gymnastics on an otherwise simple melody, or the pristine layered harmony — two elements that have become all but the aural fingerprints…

Well, they said it couldn’t be done, but a pretentious English band finally made an album about being depressed. Black Box Recorder, currently being bruited about as the very last word in detached cool, is a grim trio indeed. “Child Psychology,” the first single from its 1999 debut, England Made…

Talking about music, goes the old wisdom, is like dancing about architecture. What Van Morrison called the “inarticulate speech” at the center of musical expression might explain why a significant number of music bios, from the glamour-puss paperback to the stately career overview, often spiral off into fan-boy strokes or…

Okay, so this six-piece San Francisco-based honky-tonk combo pretty much has a handful of notes in its repertoire. And maybe there aren’t many surprises, musically or lyrically, on Alameda County Line, the group’s third full-length release (and the second to be produced by Dave “King of California” Alvin); this is…

Preacher Boy is on the run. The artist formerly known as Christopher Watkins is somewhere just past the exit to Boise, trying to get the hell out of Utah as fast as he can. “We are really in the wilds now, man. I don’t know how long it’s gonna hold…

It’s that blasted rock iconography that gets in the way, screwing up what should be a fresh perspective and an unprejudiced listen. For example: If you’ve heard about Wisconsin-based trio Rainer Maria, you probably know that Caithlin De Marrais and Kyle Fischer met at a poetry workshop at the University…

First and always, it was that voice, a sound that seemed to have traveled 500 years to get here. A clean, high tenor that indulged in no tricks or frills to make its point, but could hint at a cry or a prayer with just a subtle shift. A voice…

We find ourselves in a moonlit English graveyard, in front of an ancient set of chained doors set into a dilapidated mausoleum, behind which we can detect a slow, stentorian breathing — can you hear it? That labored huffing of an angry thing trapped inside, left to mark out its…

Without an ounce of embarrassment, the author states that he spent the first 22 years of his life in semi-rural West Virginia. Not even stints in Virginia Beach, Toronto, D.C., and the Valley of the Sun have been able to shake the formative detritus of that era. It’s hard, God…

On January 10, last Wednesday as I write this, MTV premièred a 90-minute made-for-television movie titled Anatomy of a Hate Crime, based on the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a famous case you might remember. Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man who attended the University of Wyoming at Laramie, was beaten…

The problem isn’t what to say about Ireland’s remarkable Chieftains, it’s where to begin. And, as Paddy Moloney might say, when in doubt, one simply begins at the beginning. In 1963, piper Moloney, late of the traditionalist folk group Ceoltóiri Cualann, recruited a band of fellow musicians in order to…

John Cale’s first solo album, released two years after his bitter break with the Velvet Underground, was something of a shock for those who remembered his final contributions to the band on White Light/White Heat. Vintage Violence, sporting a cover showing Cale staring impassively from behind an opaque mask, was…

In 1989, zoologist Mark Carwardine and author Douglas Adams (the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series) traveled around the world, taking pictures of species on the verge of extinction. Poaching, hunting, industrial fallout, rampant disease and a variety of other influences were cutting into herd sizes and forever altering ecological…

Maybe it’s the Decembral thinning of the desert air, or maybe I just can’t handle my Mickey’s Big Mouth the way I used to . . . but whatever it is, these three EPs are going a long way toward buoying my spirits through the cold winter weeks, and so…

Aaron Blount, lyricist and guitarist for Austin-based Knife in the Water, is but two degrees of separation from president-elect George Dubya, kind of. “He used to be my dad’s next-door neighbor, years back,” Blount laughs. “It’s really weird to see him on TV now. My dad spoke to him a…

If you’re like me, you tend not to pay much attention to the actual CD itself; you just tear the plastic wrapping and peel off whatever annoying adhesives the company has seen fit to slap all over the case, take the disc out and pop it in without really looking…