On Demons, its second album, this Baltimore band demonstrates that emo needn’t be the sound of 15-year-old guys complaining about a dateless prom night. Liars Academy plays a muscular post-punk hard rock that’s distinguishable from the alternative rock of Bush and Live because it’s not as catchy or as memorable;…

They’re right about the empty street: That’s the only place these two knit-wearing, tightly harmonizing, acoustic-guitar-strumming Norwegian folk-popsters could survive a riot, if the soft-shoed ballads and featherweight “rockers” on their third album are any indication. Get past the intrinsic tweeness of their sound — and of their album cover,…

As a nation, no one does much better at total sonic immersion than the French. In their soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and on the underrated 10,000 Hz Legend, Parisian down-tempo maestros Air created a world of luxe melancholy draped in moody prog-rock guitar; on their fine new…

These Swedish Jennie bombs came to American attention in 2002 as the female counterpart to the Hives, whose front man Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist dates lead Hotnight Maria Andersson. On their kick-ass third album, the Saharas get away from that easy comparison, sharpening the hooks in their wily garage-pop tunes and…

As a touring member of R.E.M., a late-era member of Big Star and a co-leader (with his friend Jon Auer) of the defunct Seattle power-pop band the Posies, singer/songwriter/producer/multi-instrumentalist Ken Stringfellow’s got nothing to prove in the capable-of-crafting-a-catchy-hook department. So on Soft Commands, his third solo album, he doesn’t really…

This English dance-pop outfit is one of the world’s biggest electronic acts in countries that aren’t the United States, where we prefer our techno nerds white, bald and annoying. This is despite the fact that Rollo Armstrong, the producing mastermind behind Faithless, is Dido’s brother and helped construct her easy-drinking…

If The Tipping Point, the sixth studio album by Philadelphia hip-hop crew the Roots, sounds like it lacks the genre-busting centerpiece each of the band’s previous albums has featured, it’s because it does. There’s nothing here as instantly ear-catching as “You Got Me,” the svelte hyperballad from 1999’s Things Fall…

When At the Drive-In, the greatest multiracial post-punk band ever from El Paso, Texas, broke up three years ago, half of its members formed Sparta and began ambling down a road from Over the Top Town to Well-Meaning Dullsville. Wiretap Scars, Sparta’s 2002 debut, was At the Drive-In with none…

Disappointed by the Cardigans’ swerve from disco-flecked fizz-pop into touchy-feely roots-rock on their new Long Gone Before Daylight? Don’t turn to these fellow Swedes for comfort. This self-titled album, the follow-up to a CD released to the sound of crickets in 2000 by the Seattle indie Up, is a relaxed…

Last month at the band’s final show in the New York City area, Phish invited special guest Jay-Z onstage for a couple of numbers, drawing a line between two retiring heavyweights of two very different scenes: jam-rock and hip-hop. Like Jay and his Black Album, Phish has proclaimed that the…

It’s baaaack! This summer sees the Vans-sponsored Warped Tour reaching its 10th summer of rocking young people in baggy shorts silly with a motley crew of relatively diverse bands from across the spectrum of “aggressive music” — however you choose to define it. As always, there’s wheat, and then there’s…

Last year the Georgia-based rapper Bubba Sparxxx made an underappreciated record called Deliverance that presented a bracing vision of hip-hop told from the perspective of a small-town country bumpkin. This year the Nashville duo Big & Rich is flipping that coin, playing country music from the POV of slick Music…

Before he was a member of this bicoastal dance-punk outfit, drummer John Pugh belonged to the same small but energized Arkansas music scene I did; every time the pre-Pugh !!! would come to Little Rock, we’d throw a dance party raucous enough to attract the cops but good-natured enough to…

Like their stateside sisters the Dixie Chicks, the Corrs have watched their commercial success grow as they’ve pruned the traditional musical elements that originally defined them from their sound. Borrowed Heaven, the photogenic family group’s fourth studio album, contains traces of their Irish heritage, but the flavor’s never more prevalent…

In the video for his new single “Whatever It Takes,” Ron Sexsmith makes his way through a sea of delicately disco-dancing young people; a couple of times he even gets close to shaking a leg himself, presumably moved to motion by the song’s gorgeous soul-pop sparkle. Singer/songwriterdom needs more of…

Pedro the Lion front man David Bazan is, without question, a member of America’s emo-rock fraternity: He records for genre clearinghouse Jade Tree, there’s a picture of a cuddly lion on the cover of his new album, and he called his first CD It’s Hard to Find a Friend. But…

The Stills, from Montreal, have the skimpiest backstory of any of the definite-article bands that have won hipster acclaim over the past couple of years. They’re not rich kids, divorcs or Swedish; they don’t wear uniforms or brag about puking up both lungs in all-night benders in Tuscaloosa. Still, Logic…

Right now in England, forming a band to play self-consciously epic guitar rock in the key of U2 is about as original as learning three chords on a beat-up Stratocaster in a Brooklyn loft space is here. So give it up for the guys in Sussex’s Keane: They formed a…

Of all the lame-assed rock-band reunions we’ve weathered over the past decade, perhaps the Pixies’ hurts the least. This band of Boston oddballs made four and a half albums and played about a zillion live shows — and still we know less about them than we do about Ashton Kutcher’s…

The idea that Loretta Lynn needs Jack White for a hit of precious niche-market “authenticity” would be offensive if it weren’t absurd. Note to myopic indie rockers: Lynn is old as fuck! However, White Stripe White is better than storied country vet Lynn at something way more valuable than authenticity:…

Fifty years from now, when some young rapper’s delivering Eminem’s introduction speech at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, he or she will no doubt celebrate Marshall Mathers’ nearly unparalleled knack for conflating the comedic and the tragic. Maybe the Hall will even screen 8 Mile with a…

The Cold Vein, New York hip-hop duo Cannibal Ox’s 2001 debut, served as a kind of lightning rod in the battle between underground and mainstream hip-hop that’s ravaged the form since approximately 1612. Packed with MCs Vast Aire and Vordul Megilah’s hyper-textual braggadocio and produced by Def Jux honcho El-P,…