Patty Larkin plays a hell of a guitar. Specifically, she plays a 1946 Martin D-18 acoustic, and if you don’t understand how cool that is, bad on ya. That was the era — up to the late 1940s — when Martin & Co. was making instruments that went far beyond…
The people on Sally Taylor’s new independently released Apt. 6S fall in love or don’t, get drunk, move away, shoot pool, hang out in smoke-filled bars, call each other long distance to catch up and abandon each other on wedding days. In short, the usual run of random occurrences that…
You’ve heard it before. If it’s not the oldest cliché in the business, it’s the best-known: “We’re big in Europe.” “Big in Europe” — a phrase so ancient that it’s become a sort of all-purpose joke even to people outside the music industry — means you’re skirting the issue of…
“We are revolutionaries, y’nuh,” says Bob Marley, early in Rhino’s video recollection of the creation of Catch a Fire. True in a double sense: The Wailers were emphatically political where most reggae bands of the day were not, and they were the first to aggressively construct a crossover album with…
Pig Latin (Triple X)and Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys Night Tide (Hightone Records)
Let us agree that reviewing Golden Lies, the first Meat Puppets album in five years — and the first to present Curt Kirkwood without brother Cris and Derrick Bostrom — is a fool’s errand for a Phoenix-based writer. Only a certified masochist accepts that responsibility. Let us agree to that,…
Ah, the ravages of suburban youth. Hours spent in the company of your own worthless and unattractive self. Screaming to be noticed and praying to be invisible at the same time. Long nights where you ride into town with your equally self-conscious friends to do nothing in particular, waiting for…
Texas rawk quartet Speedealer has endured its share of hassles, legal and otherwise. First there was the cease and desist order. Then there was the bankruptcy. And tonight, lead singer and guitarist Jeff Hirshberg is trying to shake some unpleasant bug he woke up with this morning, plus the cell…
Say what you want about Ani DiFranco; she knows how to associate herself with certified, 100 percent American radical pains in the ass. Fortunately, DiFranco has a certain amount of freedom in this respect; her albums, distributed through her Buffalo-based Righteous Babe label, are popular enough by now that she…
In three weeks, the Black Heart Procession finishes the solo leg of its U.S. tour and hooks up with Man or Astro-Man? for a series of dates in the Northwest and along the East Coast. Man or Astro-Man?, as you might be aware, plays manic, intergalactic surf music, Dick Dale-on-crank…
If the band thing doesn’t work out, Twin Cities-bred Dillinger Four could always, like Jello Biafra, offer its services to punks on the lookout for bizarre song titles. “Who Didn’t Kill Bambi?,” “Maximum Piss & Vinegar,” “Suckers Intl. Has Gone Public” (a title Chuck D. might covet), “Let Them Eat…
Like country and bluegrass and a host of other roots-based forms, punk music often bears the distinct imprint of whichever geographical locale produced it. Though they played the same circuits, the music produced by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys didn’t sound anything like Hank Williams. Similarly, bands like Minor…
Moris Tepper isn’t home right now. He was up last night until dawn, and he has to drive way out from his seaside home before noon today, lugging tapes for a couple of albums he’s helping to produce. Two days ago he was up working in his studio until 5…
It’s not that White Pony is a bad album; it might even be a transitional album. Taken by itself, though, there’s just not much on it to distinguish Deftones from a host of other melodic metal bands, both above and below average. And that, especially from a band as inventive…
Depending on how you count, Rock ‘N’ Roll Singer is the second or third solo outing by Mark Kozelek, the songwriting arm of the Red House Painters. Although the RHP’s Ocean Beach (1995) and Songs for a Blue Guitar (1996) were dominated by him (the latter completely, in fact), this…
Joseph Arthur is in the middle of a long series of phone interviews from the U.K., where he’s currently recording. Out of hundreds of variations on the same questions, what’s the one thing he doesn’t want to be asked? “Oh. Ahhhh . . . ‘How did Peter Gabriel get your…
Back in the mid-’80s, when Athens, Georgia was the new Left Bank and all bands Southern were undergoing a great deal of public scrutiny, Drivin’ n’ Cryin’ was supposed to have been “The Next Big Thing.” It never happened, despite the support of friend Peter Buck and a string of…
When in 1980 I first jammed my eight-track cartridge of Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! into the maw of my father’s massive console stereo, and he heard the boinky-squeaky sounds emerging from his speakers, he looked at me like I’d lost my natural 9-year-old mind. I…
Perhaps it was optimistic to think this wasn’t much of an issue anymore, but the reviews of nyc ghosts and flowers seem to fall under two general, and stupidly familiar, headers: (1) Sonic Youth is, and has been ever since ’round about 1990, coasting on soft/inferior material, of which this…
