Optometry is hardly the first album to mingle jazz, hip-hop and DJ culture. Indeed, it’s not even the first platter to do so on Thirsty Ear. In June 2001, Spring Heel Jack, a London duo that’s rightly viewed as an innovator in the drum ‘n’ bass subgenre, unleashed its own…
Can the music be called Brit pop if the musicians in question take more influences from the Mississippi Delta than from their Liverpool-area origins, as is the case with Gomez? Lacking a better term, the awe-inspiring quintet describes its music as “psychedelic blues.” And while there’s no easy way to…
My landlord knew a drug dealer in high school. The dealer had a bunch of acid stashed in his sock. It was a hot day. His feet got sweaty, and he absorbed most of the blotter. After a week in the emergency room, the guy was still wild-eyed, queasy and…
is, at the..Living Out Loud
When queried in an interview a couple of years ago as to whether he was really the fabled Ugly Casanova, Modest Mouse front man Isaac Brock immediately went all prickly. “Aw, man,” he groaned. “You’ve got to let some things stay a mystery.” And then he set the screen on…
The Stylistics’ Airrion Love is recalling Linda Creed, who in her early 20s penned many of the group’s biggest hits, from “Break Up to Make Up” to “La La Means I Love You.” “She was a beautiful girl,” says the soft-spoken tenor. “She had a uniqueness for lyrics. And that’s…
The stormy one-two punch (“Code Red,” “What I Built Last Night”) that opens the Casket Lottery’s third full-length runs a gamut of rock styles, making shape-shifting noise that hits like a Whippit-induced head rush. Singer and guitarist Nate Ellis, bassist Stacy Hilt and drummer Nathan “Junior” Richardson lock together like…
Jello Biafra’s scathing brand of political commentary won’t pass for comfort food in troubled times: Gooey, patriotic pabulum is best left to star-spangled yokels like Lee Greenwood or Alan Jackson. But the guy takes his anti-punditry as seriously as any free-speech proponent out there. He also has a knack for…
One of the least-used compliments in the average critic’s vocabulary is the word “consistent”; few scribes come out of a great concert exclaiming, “That was one of the most consistent shows ever!” But consistency is an important artistic attribute, particularly for a performer who hungers for career longevity, and Duke…
When you’re a little kid, cursive handwriting seems like such an arcane, esoteric thing: Its strange and indecipherable loops and swirls reduce words to fluid mystery, some secret code shared by grown-ups. By the time you actually reach adulthood, cursive looks juvenile, even quaint — the hormone-inked scrawl of impetuous…
Her voice is a glass of ice water in your sun-dazed hand. Yet its insistent cool can be a problem. As precise as her diction is, and no matter how refined her tone, their reliability makes many listeners hear her newer records as no more than more of the same…
Minimalism. The term has spawned more run-on sentences by pinheaded writers than any other movement. And yet no written word has ever allayed suspicion in this pinhead that there is little more than shuck involved in any minimal installation. In music, when the dread word minimalism rears its head, it…
Solomon Burke is known by many names: Bishop, Reverend, the Doctor, the King. In fact, his official Web site is www.thekingsolomonburke.com. And he often has been referred to as the King of Rock and Soul, whatever that means. Considering his many diverse business activities, which include a string of funeral…
Must be something about Monterrey. Picture it: Every year, the Mexican soccer league has two seasons, winter and summer, and before each season kicks off, there’s excitement in all the Mexican stadiums. Nowhere, though, is the electricity more palpable than in Monterrey, which puts on a jubilant, colorful celebration, complete…
If sharing is caring, DJ Shadow is a poster boy for restless devotion. In the six years since his seminal Endtroducing album, Marin County resident Josh Davis has collaborated with members of Radiohead, the Verve, and the Beastie Boys on U.N.K.L.E.’s gritty trip-hop LP, Psyence Fiction; produced Bay Area hip-hop…
Bluegrass music is full of hotshot musicians, but only a handful qualify as true innovators. Jerry Douglas, the extraordinary Dobro player, belongs to that exclusive club. He took an ungainly instrument with a relatively limited musical vocabulary and found a way to coax a variety of sounds from it: sweet…
Ground control to Captain Ziggy. Hello, Zig, are you there? It would seem that with Heathen, David Bowie has invited not only old aliases like Major Tom and Ziggy Stardust to the party, but also familiar collaborators like producer Tony Visconti and Pete Townshend. Heathen is Bowie’s most Bowie-sounding album…
Richie Hawtin is central to the canon of Detroit techno. Founding (with John Acquaviva) his own record label, +8, in 1989 at the age of 19, he stamped the template from which legions of youthful DJs/producers would be cast. Now Hawtin has a new toy, an invention called Final Scratch,…
Your practice space is burglarized. All your vintage equipment is gone. You’ve no secure place to rehearse your music. What will you do? What will you do? If you’re Haggis, you grit your teeth, get the story onto some local nightly news programs as quickly as possible, replace your gear,…
As the conversation winds down, drummer Bill Stevenson begins to sound concerned. “I hope I don’t . . . well, just try not to make me sound too curmudgeonly, okay? It seems like a lot of the topics we got on kind of led me in that direction. But I…
The future of music is invariably difficult to see. Mere replication doesn’t do the trick; nothing works as well the second time around. But at the same time, the “experts” — the managers, the booking agents, the promoters and the label folks — put forth enormous effort trying to mold…
If you spend any amount of time in the music industry, you don’t so much work in it as you become it. You assume its bizarre, trend-driven logic as your own, and artistic and commercial motivations intertwine with each other so tightly, they may as well be the same damn…
