For an impression of how things change, take a look at the two new Isley Brothers CDs currently on sale at your local Best Buy: Body Kiss, the veteran R&B act’s new DreamWorks album, and Legacy’s reissue of 3+3, the band’s classic 1973 LP. Six impassioned-looking young men stare out…

San Francisco resident Topher Lafata has the same bright idea lots of other former indie-rockers are riding these days: Ditch the electric guitars, mopey breakup songs and human drummers that the mid-’90s proved could be so useful and feed all that pent-up postgrad angst into the computer instead, sharpening a…

The Thorns have the sort of name that these days can attract a considerable ground swell of interest among young record-buyers: a definite article in front of a one-syllable plural noun that features a prominent long vowel. Last year the formula worked for the Hives, the Vines and the Strokes,…

Virtually all of the hatorade that’s been spilled over Madonna’s sharp American Life has actually succeeded in pointing out what’s great about the album. A sonic palette limited to sliced-and-diced guitar and producer Mirwais Ahmadzaï’s signature synth squelch; over-the-top pontifications from the singer about America’s consumer culture and her search…

Last year, the skinny white English dude Mike Skinner convinced lots of skinny white American dudes that Eminem wasn’t the only skinny white rapper dude worth lending an ear; on his potent debut as the Streets, Original Pirate Material, Skinner countered the widespread American idea that Brits can’t rap with…

The last several releases by former Spacemen 3 guitarist Jason Pierce’s psychedelic-gospel outfit Spiritualized — Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, Royal Albert Hall October 10 1997 Live and 2001’s Let It Come Down — have been as much about Pierce’s tendency toward staggering production costs as his…

It’s nearly impossible to believe now, but there was a time when the music this man made felt urgent, necessary, even. As front man of British stargazers the Verve, singer and cheekbone-booster Richard Ashcroft piloted the group to musical I-won’t-say-riches that made more ephemeral baubles by Blur and Suede seem…

Lo-fi indie pop gets a startling makeover in the able hands of Phil Elvrum, the young Washington state producer/musician who fronts the loose aggregate of crunchy creative types known as the Microphones. Over a series of albums and singles he’s made for the venerable Olympia label K, Elvrum has methodically…

The New York-based dance label Ultra excels at neat summations of current electronic-music fads: Its recent electroclash compilation pitted young nü-wavers like Chicks on Speed and Fischerspooner against their stalwart ’80s antecedents, and its new trance set, though by definition creatively atrophied, condenses all the big-room exhilaration that scene has…

Red-headed Lena Katina and brown-haired Julia Volkova are t.A.T.u., two Russian teenagers who may or may not be lesbians involved in a steamy underage relationship; 200 km/h in the Wrong Lane, their English-language debut, is scorched-earth teen-exploitation pop nearly as good as “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “Leader of the Pack.”…

The new TLC record feels less icky to me than the last Who tour, but I’m not sure why. Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey explained their quick return to the road in July with a well-paid session guy in John Entwistle’s place as a tribute to the enduring spirit of…

The last time Josh Davis was being talked and written about by lots of people he didn’t know, he had just fomented what many of those people had decided would become a fundamental change in the way musicians make records. His debut album as DJ Shadow, 1996’s Endtroducing . …

How indie rock got its groove back: Four D.C. scenesters listen to ZZ Top’s Eliminator nonstop for a week, realize its might but recognize its limits (narrow field of focus, reluctance to test goal-oriented MTV viewers’ patience, songs exclusively about body parts or carburetors) and set about retooling the formula…

If The Willies is any indication, Bill Frisell could probably make “Achy Breaky Heart” sound like a walk in the clouds. Here, the rangy jazz guitarist, banjo player (and Bad Liver) Danny Barnes, and bassist Keith Lowe revisit the terrain Frisell explored on 1995’s Nashville, spinning a handful of folk…

He may be a bald, vegan, gospel-loving peacenik, but ask him the wrong question, and Moby turns into one touchy little dude. Witness this exchange: New Times: So, new record, new songs, new live show. What can we expect this time out? Moby: Well, when I make the records, it’s…

Alicia Keys is so 2001’s Lauryn Hill: a young, beautiful, smart African-American woman with more talent than the white critical community knows how to handle, pushed to the lip of the mainstream media stage by editors and producers grateful for the chance to chip away at their guilt over never…

It’s a perfect pairing: Johnny Marr, former guitarist for the Smiths, one of the world’s most impossibly melodramatic rock bands, and the Pet Shop Boys, one of the world’s most theatrical pop groups, join forces for a set of fey, delicately heartbroken love songs packed with sophisticated melodies and shrewd…

With Neil Young taking a shot at soul-man sophistication on his new one, someone has to make use of his godfather-of-grunge claim until he gets back to rocking. On his fourth album, Seattleite Damien Jurado, who made a sort of latter-day Harvest with his plaintive 1999 disc Rehearsals for Departure,…

If there’s one thing the world most definitely does not need right now, it’s another watery mix CD from some overhyped trance DJ — you know, the ones with the tastefully modernist cover art (invariably featuring a handsome European staring meaningfully into space) and the interminable synth build-ups that eventually…

Jim O’Rourke has heard his excellent new album, Insignificance, likened to the work of flag-waving Floridian rabble-rousers Lynyrd Skynyrd one too many times. “That’s how I’ve been able to spot all the one-minute listeners,” he says, laughing, admitting that the first few bars of the record do in fact bear…

Let’s say you’re a young person, maybe between the ages of 19 and 26, and you’ve finished school and you’ve moved to a new city and you’re happily in the process of finding your way around the world, maybe working a job, maybe not, maybe riding a bike, maybe driving…

If you’ve got the time and/or the money and/or the sanity to keep close tabs on America’s bustling indie-rock underground, you no doubt know that quite a few of the scruffy slouches who run things down there are double-dipping in an increasingly shallow artistic gene pool. Simply put, stagnation’s stinking…