While the sounds of seven Harleys revving, six angels leaping and, of course, five pool cues to the head won’t necessarily ensure that consumers will pay good money for the “experience,” they are attention-getters. In the case of British bikers the Alchemysts, Zero Zen’s opener, a feedback ‘n’ splatter instrumental…

Embarrassingly gifted multi-instrumentalist Powell cut his teeth working with Todd Rundgren during the ’80s before going solo, landing for a spell on Mercury Records but never quite finding his “fit.” Given his outlook — a full plate of hook-drenched power pop with a touch of lush classic rock on the…

Love letters from the past: Stuffed inside the LP sleeve of my precious, battered copy of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession — the 1968 debut from a young New York singer-songwriter whom Columbia Records impresario Clive Davis had signed practically as she was walking offstage following a controversial performance at…

Starting an indie label these days is ludicrously simple. All you need is a modest stash of cash (CDs are dirt cheap to manufacture), a smidgen of promotional savvy (two hints: Do hook up with an established independent publicist who’s into the music you’re flogging; and don’t send promo discs…

For every mountain I climb For every river that winds For every wind that will blow I will send out my prayers For the children below. — Bill Miller, “Every Mountain I Climb” These days, it’s hard enough for parents to generate enough moral and ethical background noise to partially…

Despite our holier-than-thou attitudes and go-down-with-our-Titanic-size predispositions, we rock critics love to eat our words. Well, as long as it’s us serving our own plates and not some yob bent on humiliation and revenge; the public pillory should be reserved for those musicians with outsized egos who really deserve it…

Death Cab for Cutie makes sweet, even-tempered music that makes you feel warm and fuzzy — like nuzzling a big fluffy cat while bathing in the late afternoon sunbeams. Once you get past some of the more, ahem, cutesy aspects of the band (if you scroll hard through all your…

A four-year mainstay of the North Carolina club scene but still relative newcomers nationally, Charlotte’s Lou Ford is one of those groups that charmed the critics outta their trees a couple of years ago via a low-watt but incandescent debut, Sad, But Familiar. The signature Sweetheart of the Rodeo-meets-Exile on…

The best way to listen to a Southern Culture on the Skids album is while under the influence of alcohol, preferably the cheapest brand available, because SCOTS records generally concern: drinking, being drunk, people who have had too much to drink, the pursuit of something to drink or fried chicken…

Bitterness, in rock ‘n’ roll, does carry some currency, particularly when you’re young and hung over (and frequently stupid) with a bunch of angst axes to grind. (Just ask Elvis Costello or Courtney Love — or Korn’s Jonathan Davis, for that matter.) As time moves on, however, one learns to…

A funny thing happened to Robert Forster and Grant McLennan en route to a gig: They rediscovered their old band the Go-Betweens. And while most reunions tend to tilt more toward exhumation than reclamation, in this instance it would appear neither songwriter had been carrying around that dreaded “unfinished business”…

Once upon a time, Led Zep front man Robert Plant plaintively inquired from the stage, “Does anyone remember laughter?” Not so much flower-powerish drivel as a genuine lament for rock ‘n’ roll’s loss of innocence, it could be paraphrased these days along the lines of, “Does anyone remember aggression?” “Aggression,”…

It’s just another Friday night at a Tucson java hut with the usual folk singer serving up some low-key strum ‘n’ hum as accompaniment to young coffee achievers’ nonalcoholic mating rituals. However, on this particular evening the entertainment is provided by longtime scene veteran Chris Holiman, late of the Old…

Musicians really shouldn’t do press if they don’t want their words to come back to haunt them. In the case of Seattle singer-songwriter Damien Jurado, he’ll be living with Nick Drake comparisons for some time; his frequent admission that Drake’s second release, 1970’s Bryter Layter, is one of his two…

“Secure in my role of ‘band member,’ one-fifth of the roots-rock band the Picketts for the past 10 years,” writes Christy McWilson in her Hightone Records bio, “I always thought I’d step out in front of a firing squad before I’d step out on my own as a ‘solo artist.’…

It’s comforting to know that it’s always darkest before the dawn. Just when you think you’ve had your fill of all the ridiculous alt-country/roots-shtick outfits — the ones run by loser ex-punks whose options, like their tattoos, are slowly fading so they figure that by subbing twang for fuzztone and…

Lord knows they must’ve had fun conceptualizing and executing the artwork for this CD. The fold-out booklet depicts various artifacts (a pistol and a switchblade, syringes, whiskey bottle, etc.) along with a raft of snapshots purportedly taken by a crime-scene examiner showing how each of the six Devils, plus one…

Committed: Music From the Miramax Motion Picture (Chapter III) Ballad of Cable Hogue CD Single) Snapshot from the Lower Sonoran Desert: a steamy Saturday afternoon in July, hurtling across a dusty two-lane blacktop on the edge of Tucson as a local radio station broadcasts a special three-hour program titled Desert…

We’ll dispense with the baseball shtick and just remind you that the band’s name cheekily refers to mediocrity below and barely up to the call of duty à la underachieving ’70s slugger Mario Mendoza. We’ll attempt to ditch the ready-made Yo La Tengo comparisons — although the sweetly seesawing guy-gal…

When Tucson musician Rainer Ptacek died at the age of 46 on November 12, 1997, he left behind more than a wife and kids and an international community of grieving friends and fans. Rainer — stricken by an abrupt seizure one February morning in 1996 while riding his bicycle to…

Folks who don’t get the aesthetic parallels between, say, costumed (if admittedly rocking) clowns like Paul Revere and the Raiders and Slipknot, or the cultural similarities between of-their-era mainstream metalheads like Grand Funk Railroad and Korn, probably haven’t seen any of those excruciating where-are-they-now? features that VH1 banks with regular…