Today’s musical climate tends to lay the career blueprint right on the table: form band, release indie record, get signed, grab for the brass ring, crash ‘n’ burn, go on VH1 with your recovery tale in time for the reunion tour. What, then, to think of a group willing to…
Great songs: Every record should have one, the kind of anthem that makes you immediately want to roll down the car windows and sing along or jump up and down in your bedroom while riffing madly on your air guitar — or at least cue up again over and over…
Only the most jaded music fans could’ve ignored the full-page review — more like a white-knuckled hosanna — that Britain’s Uncut offered to Denton, Texas, power trio Lift to Experience a few months ago. Just to recap one of the more evocative passages: “They walk onstage, unannounced, looking truly frightening…
In the fall of ’82, I was a schmucky music collector unlucky enough to be working in a record store about to be slammed by the Xmas season juggernaut called Thriller. Then a promo of the first album by the Dream Syndicate — on punk label Slash and hotly tipped…
The résumé: After leaving pop-psych outfit Adventures in Stereo, Simon Dine spent a couple of years in Europe scavenging records and fine-tuning his sampling gear, and upon returning to the U.K. he hooked up with classically trained Daisy Martey, the daughter of Ghana’s top saxophonist. Taking the name Noonday Underground…
Neal Casal may be one of those scratch-your-head, yeah-I’ve-seen-his-name-somewhere artists. He turned up in the record bins briefly with 1995’s Fade Away Diamond Time not long before his label, Zoo, faded away itself, sucked into the big ol’ black hole of corporate consolidation. But the singer-songwriter is anything but obscure,…
Fall, ’76: Blue Öyster Cult is sitting pretty in the Top 20 with “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” The brainy Long Island quintet once pitched somewhat inaccurately to consumers as “the American Black Sabbath” has already consolidated a formidable live reputation and is now enjoying the fruits of nearly a decade…
With a sophomore album title worthy of Lee Hazelwood or John Fahey, a swooping, tenor-throated vocal style as invigorating as the late Jeff Buckley’s and songwriting/arranging smarts steeped equally in lush late ’60s/early ’70s grandeur and contemporary post-rock/avant-folk, Brooklyn’s Chris Lee could be a poster boy for today’s increasingly crowded…
After a detailed analysis of available documents and studies, New Times has arrived at the startling conclusion that in contemporary music, the intersection of rock ‘n’ roll and genetic research appears to be statistically marginal. There just ain’t a lot of guitar-slinging Petri dish mavens out there. This is all…
It’s embarrassingly easy to poke fun at journeyman belter Eddie Money. I mean, what’s not to yuk about him? There’s Ma Mahoney’s kid Ed’s dumb stage name, of course (Buck Dharma was taken). That well-worn Quaalude story always makes for good cocktail-party chatter, too; true or not, urban legend has…
Texan (by way of New Mexico) Gilkyson has had many labels, been many things to many people: daughter (to Academy Award-winning folk singer Terry Gilkyson), sister (to X guitarist Tony Gilkyson), New Age thrush (to those who tuned in to her late ’80s records and early ’90s work with Andreas…
Pop quiz time: Name all the rock ‘n’ roll “brothers” that aren’t technically made up of siblings. Lessee — Righteous Brothers, Dust Brothers, Radar Brothers, Gibson Brothers, Waco Brothers, Brothers Four, Brothers Uv Da Blakmarket . . . maybe Bros . . . Duran Duran and the Dead Kennedys …
Watch me sell five copies of the new Beta Band album before this review is over. Apparently the only Scottish combo not currently signed to Matador, the Beta Band has very little in common with its contemporaries Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai and Arab Strap. Well, maybe there is at least…
It’s a lovely Saturday afternoon in Tucson, and a casually dressed man in his late 40s is browsing a local record store’s CD bins. Suddenly he does a double take at a disc; it’s a live bootleg called Murder City Nights by legendary ’70s Australian band Radio Birdman. Snatching up…
“To me they sound like joy. Like endless lines stretching on forever in parallel. Like being so out of breath you can’t feel your hands. Like when the future looked bright and clean and we’d know what to do if there was a problem. Like all those electric cars I…
Summer’s here and the time is right for . . . well, not much, seeing as how there’s precious little on the horizon worth anticipating except for maybe the new Joe Stummer LP. Still, that release is a few weeks away. In the meantime, here are a handful of musical…
It goes without saying — but you know I’m gonna say it anyway, right? — that music provides much of life’s soundtrack, and the privately shared experience, between listener and creator, forges a deep bond. Such has been the case for your humble writer and Tucson’s Calexico. One of those…
Stiv, Johnny, Joey . . . all gone, shuffled off to punk-rock heaven. Who’s gonna be left to inspire the troops? Billy Joe Armstrong? A wimp! Dexter Holland? A poseur! The lead dork from friggin’ Buck Cherry? Surely you jest! The recent VH1-Spin special on punk’s first quarter-century felt more…
If you’re from Arizona, chances are you’ll barely glance up from the sports section when someone mentions, “Hey, a small Australian indie label, in conjunction with Rich Hopkins’ San Jacinto Records, just reissued the first Black Sun Ensemble album for the first time on CD . . .” Just because…
There’s always been something precious about Nashville folk/alt-country artist Doug Hoekstra. Not “precious” in the cute/pejorative sense; more along the lines of “indefinably rare.” Among American singer-songwriters, he’s possessed of a work ethic so uncommon and diligent it’s likely one could trace his heritage in a straight line back to…
There’s no greater compliment a fan can pay an artist than to confess that he reaches one’s most private core. Alejandro Escovedo has done so in the past for this writer, most notably on his ’93 epic Thirteen Years, a stark chronicle of tragedy, serenity and bloody-minded resolve (much of…
April 10, 1985, Hampton, Virginia: I’m sitting on a dressing-room sofa, somewhere within Hampton Coliseum, passing a bottle of red wine back and forth with Bono. A few hours earlier, U2 had flawlessly executed a show on the Unforgettable Fire tour; now, the singer is holding forth animatedly on the…
