Gin Blossoms New Miserable Experience A&M The best thing about the Gin Blossoms’ new CD isn’t the potent love songs or the teary beer tunes or even the pop guitars and vocals that come off like an alternative stepchild of the Hollies. No, the best thing about New Miserable Experience…

The Chills The Roxy September 19, 1992 Martin Phillipps of the Chills is one of the best pop singer-songwriters breathing at the moment. Phillipps composes wonderfully melodic tunes resplendent in their thoughtful lyrics and catchy chords and choruses. A Chills song is at once inventive and familiar. A Chills concert…

This is the second Sun Tracks feature for 8/19 Toss a rock into any local CD store and you’ll likely hit some sort of “tribute” disc featuring various artists paying homage to their musical mentors. For the past few years, established oldsters ranging from Elton John to Syd Barrett have…

Evan Dando, leader of the Lemonheads, is trying to describe a feeling he gets when things aren’t going well. “You know when you’re a kid and you play really hard all day? And then you sit down and everything’s still moving?” he asks. “I still feel that way sometimes. I’ll…

“I must be incredibly lucky to be me. I mean, I might well explode if I exchanged bodies with someone else.” Robyn Hitchcock is doing it again. He’s acting the eccentric. He’s waxing metaphysical. His mind’s getting away from him. Hitchcock, the crazy uncle of postmodern pop, was supposed to…

You see them at work. You see them at school. Loners. Weird guys with strange looks on their faces. Goofy guys with bodies that don’t seem to fit together and minds that don’t seem to work just right. They wear the wrong clothes, they laugh at the wrong times. They’re…

Someone smart once said that the most courageous act an individual could make was to change his mind. Consider Buffalo Tom a courageous act. The Boston-based Buff Toms have a four-year rø¡esumø¡e of hard-charging guitar songs ranging in texture from crunch to grunge. The band’s 1989 debut was appropriately released…

Somewhere near the end of Going Blank Again, the aptly titled recent release by Ride, there’s a point at which the unfortunate listener is presented with a dubious set of choices. Singer-guitarist Mark Gardner and the rest of Ride have muddled their way through almost 50 minutes of monotonous moans…

Chris Griffiths doesn’t want to hear about dance music. At least not the contemporary, guitar-oriented kind. He doesn’t care about rave” dance parties or anything that bands like the Happy Mondays or Stone Roses are doing. Griffiths says he’s tired of the neodisco that’s infected his native England and that…

It’s time for a long-overdue look at what kind of “product” is coming out of the local music scene. The number of tapes submitted was so large this time that one week won’t cover them all. Be prepared for a second installment to run soon. The variety of local music…

Adam Franklin, singer/guitarist for Swervedriver, remembers the last time he and his band encountered America. Swervedriver flew across the pond a few months ago with fellow Brits Ned’s Atomic Dustbin for a five-show, five-city tour stretching from New York to L.A. “We were constantly flying from zone to zone,” says…

It’s November 1, 1976. A little New York City club called CBGB’s is holding an audition night. The audience is buzzing. It can sense that a music scene is developing around the club’s new and exciting emphasis on punk” rock. One of the bands on the evening’s bill is called…

Webb Wilder is quite a guy. Just ask him. He’ll poke his chest forward and gladly tell you he’s the last of the full-grown men” and the idol of idle youth.” Without missing a beat, he’ll boldly claim that he’s not just a musician, but a mujician.” I can pull…

Dan Wilson is laughing. He’s chuckling from a pay telephone on the concourse of a shopping mall in Minneapolis. The background tinkling of a holiday bell-ringer accents Wilson’s conversation over the long-distance line. Dan Wilson’s happy because he’s recalling the time when his band, Trip Shakespeare, was deemed the absolute…

Although every record label wants to claim it was the first, no one really knows who invented the boxed set. Usually comprising a cardboard box, a handful of CDs and a book full of pictures, boxed sets focus on the music of a single artist, time period or genre. A…

It’s an autumn afternoon in downtown Tempe. The sun is clear and strong and there’s a breeze kicking around the aromatic remnants of the previous night’s rain. Business is brisk at the Coffee Plantation. The Tempe hot spot is cluttered with the usual crowd–students, artists, the fashionably underemployed and the…

AZMC ’91: PLAYING FOR KEEPS Ahhh . . . there’s nothing like a music conference. Musicians of every size, taste and hair style steal into town. Music-business people–everyone from writers and deejays to promoters and record-company executives–fly in and schmooze themselves silly. During the day, everyone drifts in and out…

Charles Michael Kitteridge Thompson IV is bored. Mr. Thompson, better known by his stage name “Black Francis,” is submitting to an interview about his band, the Pixies. But the singer-guitarist sounds like he’d much rather be doing something else. “I’m not comfortable making a big deal out of things,” he…

“It’s easy to write a song when you’re upset about something,” says Jeff Tweedy of Uncle Tupelo. “I mean, the last thing you want to do when you’re happy is sit down and write about it. It almost seems like you’re bragging.” Tweedy certainly isn’t a boastful guy. He could…

Nick Cope of the Candy Skins knows his band sounds like the Sixties. He understands when critics say the Candy Skins’ debut LP Space I’m In borrows heavily from the Byrds and the Beatles. Cope doesn’t even let comparisons to the Monkees bother him. The Candy Skins love those old…