“I wish a tomato would carry me away.” Perhaps these lyrics aren’t the truest universal to be found on the brazen and amazing new album by Reubens Accomplice, The Bull, The Balloon and The Family, but they’re the ones that best encapsulate the frustration guitarists Jeff Bufano and Chris Corak…

Waylon and Willie spearheaded the outlaw movement in country music, but if you separate their stylistic felonies like fiddle shunning and pigtail wearing from the real ones, what’s mostly there is pill popping and tax cheating. Johnny Cash did a few nights in the cooler for drunk and disorderly, and…

Few of us will ever know the joy of invention, devising something of dual capability that not only fills the needs of the many but gets to touch millions of ladies’ breasts. Paxton Quigley, inventor of the Super-Bra, is one such person. This crafty miss recently designed a brassiere that…

It’s only fitting that the Zombies enjoyed their biggest-ever hit posthumously. The group’s excellent 1964 debut chart entry “She’s Not There” set the tone for pop over the next three years — moody minor-key masterpieces where breathy singer Colin Blunstone sighed about not getting the girl while Rod Argent trilled…

The Thin White Investment’s got a new album, his best since — Scary Monsters? There are two possible reactions to this news. The more common one — rolling your eyes — is what you are probably doing right now. The other is to discard a Bow Wow Wow disc to…

With Americano!, Roger Clyne and his caballeros have returned with the most potent album in their Southwest-loving canon. Before we pin gold stars on each of their ponchos, though, let’s examine this song cycle from its effective starting point, “God Gave Me a Gun.” Released in advance of the album…

Nothing screams “nothing new” quite like a “Battle of the Bands” contest. It’s not so much the groups themselves competing for cash or valuable prizes or beer sponsorship that inspire yawns so much as the non-delivery of a real blood-drawing battle. What’s so special about bands performing the same sets…

“Here, put this on.” Nearly everyone you met in 2003 came with a personal soundtrack. From the little middle school “sevvie” in your car pool who carried a personal mix CD in her backpack to the businessman in front of you at the ATM playing Dido just a little too…

Just as sure as you’ve never heard anyone profess, “I love waiting in a doctor’s office because the magazines are topnotch,” you’ll never hear anybody bragging about the riveting experience of recording an album. After the excitement of who the producer will be and what gear you’ll be using wears…

What amazes women most about that contraption called man is his knack for never asking the pertinent questions. Like “How can a guy be friends with another guy for years and not know what he does for a living?” Or “How can we find it on Mapquest if you don’t…

After the exhilarating one-two punch of last year’s Stereo/Mono, you might’ve expected a knockout single disc of Paul Westerberg, all killer and no filler, a disc that gave jaw-dropping ballads and inspired throwaways equal time and maybe revealed something about the cigar-chomping Minneapolitan you didn’t already know. What you’ve got…

Once you’re nearing your fourth decade as a recording artist, your audience has every reason to expect you will never again make an album that hits the ball out of the park 13 out of 13 times. Hell, they’ll be happy if you lumber around the bases even once like…

No doubt you’ve gotten on with your life since 1991, but we here at the Muso Band Institute have been torturing ourselves for more than a decade with one persistent, nagging question — “Is Primus a muso band?” Year after excruciating year of listening to slap happy bassists thwack a…

An even greater mystery than Carly Simon’s “who’s so vain” saga: Which real-life metal band most closely embodies the fictional travails of Spinal Tap? Few hit pay dirt better than that German musical concentration camp known as Helloween. They’ve got it all — the brooding mysticism of Dio, the Reaper…

Folks who bought the Psychedelic Furs’ debut album digested the word “stupid” a riveting 14 times. And it wasn’t just any ol’ stupid. When Richard Butler’s croaky timbre does the syllable stretching, stupid becomes styoooopid, a distinction of noble beauty. Through the Furs’ decade-plus career, styoooopid became a recurring buzz…

Most parents chart their child’s growth from notches on the wall. Diane and Chuck Simo can follow their son Jeff’s progress from the career memorabilia hanging in the family’s rec room. There’s his first guitar, a toddler-size Stratocaster called the Synsonics Junior Pro. Next, the folks show a photo of…

Crank up this album, with its ripping, Motörhead-hearted opener “It’s Gonna Be a Long Night” closely followed by the band’s trippy dippy salute to “Zoloft,” with feel-good platitudes and soothing helicopter sounds whooshing from speaker to speaker, and people’ll ask, “What the hell is this?” Tell them it’s Ween, and…

Yes, only God can make a tree, but only England can produce the rock stars who routinely plow into them. Or, when a tree is not readily available, an irate parking attendant. What other choice did Iron Maiden timekeeper “Nicko” McBrain have when he found himself late for a show…

Can Bob Dylan’s most enigmatic album be one he’s hardly even on? Like an absentee landlord, the masked but hardly anonymous Robert Z appears only four times to deliver a song and maybe change a fuse or two. Yes, it’s the soundtrack to his insta-cult film Masked and Anonymous, but…