For decades, critics have been leveling such denunciations as arch, portentous, heavy-handed, and precious at rock music. Destroyer’s Dan Bejar has managed to turn those denunciations into attributes. His vocals feature mannerisms that we’d usually find annoying in our U.K. cousins: feyness, enthusiastic offhandedness, melodramatics, self-importance, and smugness. (Think: Bowie,…

Noise is a relative concept — for many, it is what interferes with what we’d prefer to hear. For others, noise is a means to an end, a catharsis, or an inverse of what’s known as “harmony.” The Who, Velvet Underground, and the Beatles pioneered the inspired use of noise…

Let’s get real here — lots of what makes the “country” charts (in case you haven’t noticed) sounds like watered-down power-pop with some vague twang added for “authenticity.” Most of these pretty boys/girls wouldn’t know Buck Owens from Buck Rogers — but this Justin Townes Earle knows, I’ll wager. If…

Call ’em retro, sans cheesy affectation for 1960s pop/folk-rock classicists, but don’t call ’em late for dinner — Elf Power is back with another in a series of classy, winsomely tuneful albums wherein engaging melodies and sweet harmoniousness unquestionably rule. Elf Power is an offspring of pre-White Album Beatles, Searchers,…

Naming no names, but after listening to an album by a certain “alt-bluegrass” combo, a mini-epiphany alighted: Why listen to a half-assed, smug-hipster version of bluegrass when the real thing — Ralph Stanley, Gibson Brothers, even Alison Krauss — is available? Listening to the Avett Brothers posed a similar argument…

Anybody out there remember the ’80s U.K. combo Blue Aeroplanes? They’re the closest comparison this critic’s strained brain can make to the eclectic, happily hard-to-pigeonhole Oakland band Why? While in no way imitative of Blue Aeroplanes, Why? shares stylistic similarities with them — bright, buoyant, terse indie-rock melodies; distinctive, cozy…

In the past five or 10 years, indie rock’s subgenres have been multiplying like bacteria. Dream pop, shoegaze, sadcore, slowcore . . . one has to be a scholar to keep them straight. Ida deserves a tag all its own — “minimalist folk” or “quietcore folk-rock.” We can’t comment on…

There aren’t very many guitar-slingers who could consistently work with such exacting taskmasters as Frank Zappa and Robert Fripp, not to mention the thin white duck, er, duke — David Bowie. Usual suspects: a) Tom Verlaine; b) Adrian Belew; c) Gary Sinise. If you chose “b,” congrats! Between 1978-2002, Belew…

Rock stars often sing of desperation — touring is hell (fans and groupies want of piece of you, sigh), gimme shelter (in a private helicopter), and “you don’t have to live like a refugee.” Rebellious punk bands sing of disaffected-youth angst and how soul-destroying life in the ‘burbs is. Then…

In the underrated Allison Anders movie Grace of My Heart (in which Ileana Douglas starred as a singer/songwriter loosely based on Carole King), Bridget Fonda has a cameo as a teen-dream 1960s pop singer who’s a closeted (duh) lesbian. The song Fonda’s character sings in the movie, “My Secret Love,”…

For every quote, cliché, or saying, there is something or someone to disprove it. Dionne Warwick has disproved F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “no second acts in American lives” quip famously. With a voice both honeyed and dusky, Warwick was frontwoman for one of the greatest partnerships in pop history, Burt Bacharach…

There was a time when blues and R&B/black popular music were not so very far apart. Performers such as Etta James, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and Little Johnny Taylor merged the gritty, down-home aspects of the former with the polished, up-market style of the latter for a combination that could wow…

Great gods of gravy, where would the hep world be without the subtle machinations of the Cramps and Stray Cats? Why, there wouldn’t hardly be any rock-a-billy music ’round at all! Not to trash those combos (who’ve had their moments, especially their earliest singles), but there were (and are) truer,…

In the 1950s, along with Ray Charles, singer Napoleon “Nappy” Brown was one of the transitional performers between blues and rhythm & blues (the latter in the ’60s transmuted to “soul music”). Proceeding from a blues foundation, Brown worked gospel, pop, and jump-blues (i.e., Louis Jordan) into the mix. That,…

After his departure from the Byrds in the mid-’60s, late Americana icon Gram Parsons envisioned “Cosmic American Music,” a savory stew of traditional country with flavors of rock ‘n’ roll, Southern soul/R&B, and gospel. Though some bands striving to follow in GP’s boot prints get the country-twang aspect, too many…

San Francisco trio The Kim Philbys has guts — don’t they realize bands these days are supposed to be predictable, either melodious or arty-abrasive, not both? In this manner, they recall (yet don’t sound like) the Meat Puppets, who encompassed brutal sonic assaults, lysergic twang, and ZZ Top-like boogie. The…

Psychedelic music — sounds to evoke or accompany chemically enhanced/altered states of imagination/perception — existed long before Syd Barrett or John Lennon dropped their first tab of “sunshine” in the 1960s. In 1830, prompted by the double-whammy mojo of unrequited love and opium, French composer Hector Berlioz composed his masterwork,…

Has our ‘Shell gone all “born again” or something? Nope — eclectic folk-rocker Michelle Shocked has discovered the joys and power of the African-American gospel tradition. Although she’s being singing in an African-American church choir for a while, with the live recording To Heaven U Ride, Ms. Shocked has avidly…

Are the Resonars a “real band” or aren’t they? Only Matt Rendon knows for sure, and he’s not saying (yet). To paraphrase the immortal Bard, what’s in a band . . . as long as platters as nifty as Nonetheless Blue result? Tucson’s Resonars is basically singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Matt Rendon (Vultures,…

With song titles such as “Dead Voices,” “Cruel Beauty,” and “Forget Yourself,” it’s a sure bet the USSA debut disc isn’t going to be tagged power-pop or Americana. With members including Paul Barker of Ministry and Duane Denison of Jesus Lizard (and Tomahawk), USSA, for the most part, sustains its…

Before those hand-holding mop-tops from Liverpool hit these shores, instrumental rock was extremely popular. The charts belonged to The Ventures, Dick Dale, Link Wray (big influence on The Who’s Pete Townshend), and even Brits like the Shadows and Tornados. After Beatles, Stones, Dylan, and the “sophistication” that followed in their…

The Mekons are among the few bands surviving from the “glory days” of punk rock — 2007 marks their 30th anniversary. The reason for their longevity (aside from their members engaging in an assortment of musical activities apart from Mothership Mekons) is their treating music as a constantly changing, evolving…