One stands, one sits! Both sing, rock and overextend themselves! It’s a simple winning concept that every minimalist duo without a bass player has employed to great personal gain, but few have excelled with greater zeal for multi-tasking and whimsy like James Karnes and Chris Pomerenke. Living on opposite ends…

Thank you-know-who for Mormons, because we never would have had good ol’ blasphemous goth music otherwise. The blurry rear cover photo of element a440’s debut album makes the troubled trio of Halo, Trick and December look like Columbine trick-or-treaters (singer Halo looks especially spookish with his severely razored Nixon hairline),…

Few may have noticed, but history of sorts was made this past March with the release of Now That’s What I Call Music! Volume 18. For the first time since Now! Volume 3’s triple bang opener of Smash Mouth, Lenny Kravitz, and blink-182 last millennium, an installment of this best-selling…

If they really wanted to bring tantrum suppression to an amphitheater near you, they might’ve added The Game or Jah Rule or Triumph the Insult Dog to the bill. But this is more like a Rap Pack love fest, with Eminem most certainly Chairman of the Board, crunked-up Lil Jon…

“The voices of hardcore and metal will be heard,” warns the Living Dead-themed official Web site of this tour. And while things won’t go quite as long as dawn, the show will get under way at the ungodly hour of 11 a.m., when most of us are zombies even with…

Calling John Hiatt a songwriter’s songwriter makes it sound like people don’t like him. People do — they’re just not as demonstrative as Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, Iggy Pop and Bruce Springsteen, all of whom have paid the ultimate compliment by covering a John Hiatt song…

It wasn’t a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup moment when this Brooklyn trio learned they could merge cool jazz, poetry and rap into a desirable package (The Last Poets, The Jungle Brother, De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest can all arm-wrestle over first honors). But Digable Planets scored the…

It used to be that the most ironic thing in my music collection was my LP of A-Tom-ic Jones, with the swivel-hipped singer posing in front of a bloody red mushroom cloud while autographing “Best Wishes” — it’s a safe bet the previous owner wasn’t Japanese. Now comes this Battle…

It’s not exactly party-crashing if you don’t know Chase Stain or the local record label he’s been running for the past decade, but if it makes you feel more punk rock to bilk, then entertain that notion. At this all-ages extravaganza with no cover charge, you can sample a dozen…

There are a lot of ex-smokers in the world, judging by the testimonials on Amazon.com regarding Jesse Sykes’ husky voice (e.g., “makes me want to take up smoking again,” or how about “I found myself reaching for Dunhills that weren’t there”). It’s a wonder the surgeon general didn’t write the…

This is an essential night out for fans of raffish, infectious, congenial and, yes, fun pop music. All the way from Oslo, you’ve got ’60s revivalists The Jessica Fletchers, sounding like some English, phonetically assembled band from Nuggets II, decked out with flutes and strings but still managing to pack…

No disrespect for co-headliners J-Live and Vast Aire (of Cannibal Ox), but the star attraction and the recipient of any spare ice backstage has to be New York’s rap fixture C-Rayz Walz, who was the only three-time champion of the long-running EOW MC Challenge freestyle contest, and was even banned…

Everybody loves to see a good bitch-slapping, and the expanded DVD version of this Sundance Award-winning documentary on two friendly bands turned rivals gives you bitch-slapping in any number of directions. What was originally slated as a Brian Jonestown Massacre documentary grew to encompass the Dandy Warhols when BJM went…

You’d think having the biggest-selling local CD in 2003, The King of AZ, would have this MC resting on his braggadocio. But it’s 2005, and Atllas is champing at the mic — literally. As the title song screams out, “Hunger and Starvation” is not some Neverland faux ballad about feeding…