Music

Because Los Angeles is a music-industry center, a lot of artists from the area devote themselves to conformity — yet for some strange, unexplained reason, SoCal’s underground hip-hop scene remains a bastion of originality. The Shape Shifters epitomize this contradiction. Featuring mouthpieces Akuma, AWOL One, Circus, Die, Existereo, Life Rexall,…

1. Felt, Felt, Vol. 2: A Tribute to Lisa Bonet (Rhymesayers) 2. Manic Hispanic, Grupo Sexo (BYO Records) 3. 3 Melancholy Gypsies, Grand Caravan to the Rim of the World (Legendary Music) 4. The Regulations, The Regulations (Havoc) 5. Look Back and Laugh, Look Back and Laugh (Lengua Armada) 6…

Like the comforting inevitability of nature’s cycles, Fruit Bats’ Eric Johnson returns every two years with more woodsy acoustic numbers that crawl out of the underbrush to feel the warmth of the sun. Spelled in Bones continues to revel in pastoral delights, but Johnson gives the new album a little…

Considering that son simply means “song,” one can imagine a wide definition. Indeed, this homegrown Cuban music developed from numerous styles more than a century ago, though most featured the defining tres (a guitar with three sets of equally tuned strings). If that instrument is the definitive sound, Sierra Maestra…

For the past 10 years, Bob Mould has been busy battling tinnitus, paying the bills by writing TV scripts for professional wrestling (!), and indulging a newfound passion for club music. With Body of Song, he returns from the wilderness to hard, passionate pop-rock — though he’s blissfully indifferent to…

There’s a never-ending supply of the young, loud and snotty picking through the rock trash heap, but the legions of glam punk godfathers are few. While many of his peers lived fast and died young — or simply settled into comfortable obscurity — singer and guitarist Jeff Dahl has maintained…

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…

It’s a morbid business, but most practical editors in the journalism racket have a folder filled with pre-written obituaries all ready to go for seriously ill, soon-to-be-departed public figures of import. John Prine undoubtedly found his way into some of those folders in 1998, when he was stricken with cancer…

Half the fun of being a power-pop fan is digging up bits of manna that five other people have ever heard and grousing that they should’ve been hits. And while there’s no shortage of lilters with one great tune — ever hear of Suzy Saxon or the band Candy? –…

You can’t take the country out of the boy, but at some point it just becomes a strut, an air, a way of rocking. Though Lucero started out sounding neo-traditional enough to have followed Son Volt, Ben Nichols and his partner Brian Venable were punks looking to cheek off their…

When musical boundaries correspond to racial ones, bands usually cross them self-consciously, from The Clash’s tributes to early rap, to Mos Def’s “Ghetto Rock.” On the other hand, Atlanta’s El Pus (rhymes with “moose”) came to party rather than fulfill some social mission. On Hoodlum Rock, Vol. 1, the all-black…

For the past six years, The Briefs have been sticking Seattle’s mopey indie-rock ass with a healthy shot of ’77-style punk rock, and the fun is quickly spreading nationally. The quartet’s sound pledges allegiance to such forebears as the Ramones, the Buzzcocks, the Vibrators, and the Rezillos — their style…

It’s perfectly fine to be gay (Rob Halford) or a doddering old fart (Ozzy), but there’s simply no crying in metal, unless maybe your drummer bro gets run over by a U-Haul trailer in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. That’s why Megadeth front man Dave Mustaine is still a bit of a punch…

Darkest Hour’s new disc, Undoing Ruin, could easily beat up its first album, Hidden Hands of a Sadist Nation, where the band was trying to be At the Gates. For that effort, Darkest Hour went so far as to record in Sweden with Fredrik Nordstrom (At the Gates, In Flames)…

On his 10th solo album, Frank Black approaches Southern roots and soul, not as a philanderer, but as a lover. Which stands to reason: Since 1998’s Frank Black & the Catholics, this head Pixie’s leering weakness for genre-play has gradually given way to something more heartfelt. The rich, dewy arrangements…

Punk rock history is littered with dismal attempts at creative growth, from the Angelic Upstarts’ New Wave misstep to Seven Seconds’ spiritual awakening. But on 13 Ft. & Rising, the California desert rats in Throw Rag make a satisfying step forward that’s unlikely to irk their biggest fans. And anyway,…

A sharp songwriter with the interpretive powers of a classic soul singer and the timbre of Jerry Lee Lewis in his prime, Joe Ely should be a country music icon. Then again, have the 30 years since Ely’s first solo work produced a single Nashville-friendly face that doesn’t cheapen fame?…

“I don’t pay taxes because I never file, I don’t do business that don’t make me smile,” sang Stephen Stills on his 1990 classic “Tree Top Flyer,” about a free-spirited smuggler. It’s what inspired Ray LaMontagne to leave his job at a Maine shoe factory. Instead of going to work…