“I’m not a musicologist,” Dave Alvin insists for the third time in 15 minutes, “but let’s say you have a certain amount of knowledge that there was a higher percentage of, maybe, Africans from the northeast quadrant of the continent in a particular section of the American South, as a…

While listening to Live on the Sunset Strip — a 1982 performance in which Richard Pryor discusses his first trip to Africa, his 180-degree turnaround on his formerly cavalier use of the word “nigger,” his visit to an Arizona prison while filming Stir Crazy with Gene Wilder, and the infamous…

Done up in the style of a ’50s-era movie poster, all flat paint and a grab bag of typescript, the cover of this boxed set says all that needs to be said. There’s a smiling guitarist looking over a nighttime scene, palm trees, a silhouetted couple leaning in a loose…

Laurie Anderson, you will not be surprised to learn, is a downright charming conversationalist. Furthermore, to the delight of anyone who’s appreciated her 20-plus years of storytelling art, she often strays from the trajectory of the central topic to indulge in illustrative narratives that somehow provide the perfect foil for…

The boxed set, that most ubiquitous and painstakingly completist of modern-day music anthologies, can be a force for good or ill. The form has given us both utter delights like John Coltrane’s 16-disc The Prestige Recordings and utterly useless dreck like (why? why?) Who Was That Masked Man?, a five-CD,…

We who labor under the auspices of the music desk at this here urban newsweekly have only your best interests at heart, and may God or Lilith or Zoaraster whap us with a bolt of lightning in the spleen if this isn’t the strict, unvarnished truth. We humbly consider ourselves…

Maybe it’s the fact that they’re on Chapel Hill’s Merge Records, maybe it’s the boy/girl vocal interplay, maybe it’s their celebrated and seemingly endless back catalogue of EPs and singles, maybe it’s their penchant for happy melodies and verbal knife-twisters like “We don’t have to pretend we’re married/But we like…

You know that commercial for the really skinny television? The one that fades out with Gomez’s cover of the Beatles’ “Getting Better”? Did you know those guys were only 11 years old? No. But really, it’s pretty bloody amazing. They’re not terribly old, neither individually nor as a band, but…

Kay (pronounced kai, like sky) — who, like the other members of mostly punk outfit Sunshine, prefers to go by his first name — keeps apologizing for his English. “I’m sorry, it’s very difficult to speak on the phone with me,” he says for the third time. “Many people tell…

“This past summer,” says Andrew Rieger, “we were in Kyoto, Japan, and there was a great crowd came out, they were really into it. And when we were done with the show, they all, all the kids, they grabbed us and made us start dancing with them. For about two…

The first words Johnny Cash sings on American III: Solitary Man are “I won’t back down”; the last are “I am just going over Jordan/I am just going over home.” In between is a 14-song rumination on death and redemption as uplifting as it is, in places, utterly terrifying. It’s…

The difference between being trendy and being au courant is just this: For the former, you need only watch half an hour of television each day; but for the latter, you have to dig around and do a little research. The very phrase “Latin Revolution” as it’s applied to contemporary…

I have seen the future of pop music, and its name is Robbie Williams. . . . is I guess what we’re supposed to say after wading through this 50-minute valentine from Williams to himself, but Lordy, how it do fall flat. It might be taken as parody, I suppose,…

Pay attention now. This is complicated. This was in Chicago, long about early 1994. Sam Prekop and Eric Claridge had been in a band called Shrimp Boat, recently defunct. Archer Prewitt was a member of the Cocktails, which had similarly disbanded. All three were friends of a guy named John…

In 1994, Boston-based trio Morphine mounted an extensive tour throughout America and Europe in support of its second album, 1993’s Cure for Pain. That album eventually sold 300,000 copies in the first year of its release, an unprecedented feat for an indie record. It was used as the de facto…

A sort-of interview with J. Mascis, part one: It’s not that J. Mascis is sullen or inarticulate, or any of the accusatory words he’s generally described with. He’s extremely — you might say legendarily — reserved when talking to the press; but if you’re willing to give just a little…

Back in the day, kids, there used to be this shaggy musical wildebeest called the triple album. Great bloody sprawling affairs were these, six sides of the ultimate exercise in artistic hubris, implying that there was more utter wonderfulness to this particular artist’s contemporary output than even a double album…

In a way it’s not surprising, though categorically unfair, that Taj Mahal often gets snubbed by blues purists. As far back as his self-titled first album, Mahal’s records were an amalgam of musical styles only partially rooted in the blues — modal and roots music were his clearest influence –…

It gets so you don’t even read the adjectives in the press releases. Week after week, brown envelopes full of this typescript hooey come sliding through the mail slot, each one painted in the broadest histrionic strokes: “a band to make even the most jaded postpunk listener pump his fist…

Ever since last year’s macrocomputer concept album EEVIAC, Man or Astro-Man? has been working off no known template. That is, if all you know about MOAM? is the surf revival stuff from its first albums on Estrus, you’ve missed out on some pretty important shifts in attitude. A Spectrum of…

Forget that the title of Spoozys’ freshman release is a hideous illiterate redundancy, like saying, “I’m wearing jeans pants and a tee shirt top.” Ignore the fact that the voices are buried so far down in the mix that trying to decipher the garbled lyrics is like tweezing loose eyelashes…