Music

Was there ever a more beloved yet underappreciated combo than Saint Etienne? Well, sure; pop’s endless highway is littered with yesterday’s papers, musical roadkill too classy and talented for the general populace. And that includes the hipster indie sector — of whom, it must be said, can be as fickle…

Among Dave Matthews’ charms, quality has never been chief. He traffics in standard-issue folk-pop that occasionally gets confused with something greater — mainly because Matthews, like Sting, has learned that by adding the vaguest suggestion of world music or jazz, he can receive full credit for their influence. His singing…

Oh, my my. Oh, hell yes. The funky Meters, y’all. Sampled by Public Enemy, name-checked by the Beastie Boys, covered by Primus, joined by Dr. John and Paul McCartney, there has rarely been a group that so defined a single town’s sound the way the Meters did in the late…

Oh sure, I hear you moan. And I’m the love child of George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Actually, the Bastard Sons, who hail from San Diego, are more like the kissin’ cousins of Dwight Yoakam; but as Minnie Pearl used to sing on Hee Haw, you’ll never hear one of…

In Austin last March, the Black Halos breezed in to Emo’s and proceeded to tame an unruly SXSW crowd until the show-me punks were eating out of the Vancouver quintet’s mitts, begging for more, and getting it. As the Halos’ smeary racket slammed from the stage, acrobatic lead singer Billy…

Eric Bachmann doesn’t like to think of himself as a singer-songwriter. Ask him about the idea, and he’ll probably rasp himself into a fiery cul de sac about how the very idea of singing about your problems is nothing but self-indulgent whining, that if you’re singing in the first place,…

Britt Daniel is stalling for time. He won’t come right out and say it, but yeah, that’s what he’s doing at the moment. A few minutes ago, Daniel was paying his bills, signing checks, sealing envelopes, and now he’s in the middle of giving an interview. Or taking it, actually:…

In previous installments of this column, we’ve sufficiently covered the mail part of our equation — how the music written and recorded by you good people out there arrives at our doorstep. We’ve discussed in excruciating detail the advantages of certain kinds of corrugated mailers and explained how your parcels…

Well, they said it couldn’t be done, but a pretentious English band finally made an album about being depressed. Black Box Recorder, currently being bruited about as the very last word in detached cool, is a grim trio indeed. “Child Psychology,” the first single from its 1999 debut, England Made…

The news of a freshly polished version of the “Famous Alto Break” might not mean much to the general public, but it is the kind of event that triggers seismographic tremors among the legions of Charlie Parker fans out there. Although the clumsily titled “Break” lasts less than 40 seconds,…

They’re headin’ for the hills in Hollywood — hillbillies, that is — banjos, mandolins. Which is a way of saying that three soundtracks have arrived in record stores everywhere, a few short steps and a million miles from Eminem, all loaded with country music and all worth owning. Of course,…

Cool is in the eye of the beholder, and poet/writer Lewis MacAdams has come up with a blueprint charting the development of the elusive, unspoken, Zenlike state of American “cool.” Don’t be misled by the title. Birth of the Cool isn’t a history recounting the famed Miles Davis’ nonet sessions…

Aijuswanaseing, the debut album from Philadelphia’s Musiq Soulchild, marks him as worth paying attention to, even if the record often slips a little too readily into contorted vocal gymnastics on an otherwise simple melody, or the pristine layered harmony — two elements that have become all but the aural fingerprints…

The Gourds’ Kevin Russell is singing in a rich, backwoods holler. Over the light pluck of a mandolin, a voice rises, sounding as if it were picked up off of Highway 61 — somewhere between Bill Monroe’s blue Kentucky home and Levon Helm’s Arkansas shack. But as evocative as Russell’s…

Preacher Boy is on the run. The artist formerly known as Christopher Watkins is somewhere just past the exit to Boise, trying to get the hell out of Utah as fast as he can. “We are really in the wilds now, man. I don’t know how long it’s gonna hold…

“It’s pretty simple. There’s no smoke and mirrors. We’re just a musical group.” John Herndon is looking for a way to make it clearer, to say that all he and the rest of the guys in his band do is plug things into amps and set up microphones and try…

It would seem, on the face of things, that the musicians who want to be writers greatly outnumber the writers who want to be musicians. Maybe John Updike harbors a secret desire to strap on a Stratocaster and stand nobly under a shower of pubescent panties, but, as of yet,…

Was it really that long ago? 1987 — when Copernican rumblings emanating from Walthamstow, England, reached across the Atlantic and transmitted small but significant tremors at we indiecentric, psychedelia-inclined record collectors? Nearly a decade and a half — and umpteen albums — after Inner Marshland set its controls for the…

You can blame Blood, Sweat & Tears and Spyro Gyra for ruining the word “fusion,” because since the heyday of those groups, utter the word and thoughts of endless wank-offery appear, followed by an image of some dude soloing with a stupid pained, just-lost-a-pinkie-to-his-hedge-clippers look on his face. If you…

Okay, so this six-piece San Francisco-based honky-tonk combo pretty much has a handful of notes in its repertoire. And maybe there aren’t many surprises, musically or lyrically, on Alameda County Line, the group’s third full-length release (and the second to be produced by Dave “King of California” Alvin); this is…

Talking about music, goes the old wisdom, is like dancing about architecture. What Van Morrison called the “inarticulate speech” at the center of musical expression might explain why a significant number of music bios, from the glamour-puss paperback to the stately career overview, often spiral off into fan-boy strokes or…