Music

We’ll dispense with the baseball shtick and just remind you that the band’s name cheekily refers to mediocrity below and barely up to the call of duty à la underachieving ’70s slugger Mario Mendoza. We’ll attempt to ditch the ready-made Yo La Tengo comparisons — although the sweetly seesawing guy-gal…

Common is one ambitious cat — and hip-hop sure as hell needs more of those. But on his previous album, 1997’s One Day It’ll All Make Sense, he was so driven to create a lyrical masterpiece that his music sometimes suffered by comparison. Praise be, then, for his latest, which…

Committed: Music From the Miramax Motion Picture (Chapter III) Ballad of Cable Hogue CD Single) Snapshot from the Lower Sonoran Desert: a steamy Saturday afternoon in July, hurtling across a dusty two-lane blacktop on the edge of Tucson as a local radio station broadcasts a special three-hour program titled Desert…

Music has always reflected the mechanical sounds of the era it’s made in. Roger McGuinn noted as much in the liner notes to the Byrds’ debut, using a lot of made up words like “rrrrrrrrooooaaaaahhhhh” and “krrrrrrriiiiiisssssshhhhhh” to illustrate his point. As annoying as that sounds, he was right. Early…

When Tucson musician Rainer Ptacek died at the age of 46 on November 12, 1997, he left behind more than a wife and kids and an international community of grieving friends and fans. Rainer — stricken by an abrupt seizure one February morning in 1996 while riding his bicycle to…

For Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman — known to their fans as Dean and Gene Ween, respectively — Ween’s new album, White Pepper, was a long time coming. The duo released a double live album, Paintin’ the Town Brown: Ween Live ’90-’98, last year, but it was a quickly assembled…

The Fourth of July is also celebrated as Louis Armstrong’s birthday, even though in reality it probably isn’t. While the trumpeter was frequently accused of Uncle Tomming, the choice of America’s B-day as his own (his birth certificate was lost) means we remember him more for Uncle Samming throughout a…

Beer arches gracefully through the night like Silly String. Hair mats together in clammy clumps. Shirts already smell like Sunday morning’s Saturday night. The front of the stage is crowded with bully-faced frat guys in shorts and visors who dance about even more ridiculously than could be imagined in any…

Stiv Bators once joked that John Lennon’s last hit was the sidewalk. Bators’ last hit, you’ll recall, was the bumper of a Parisian cab, a smash that occurred exactly 10 years ago this month. But beyond the grave of the Dead Boys, and flanked by a fruitless solo power-pop trip…

Rasco and Planet Asia, two of underground hip-hop’s most consistently solid MCs, united under the alias Cali Agents with the lofty intention of making high-quality rap music commercially viable again. Both having established themselves on their own — The Source voted Rasco’s debut solo album “Independent Record of 1998,” while…

A few years ago, Providence, Rhode Island’s Amazing Royal Crowns were poised to be the next trash-‘n’-twang darlings. But their greasy pompadours, upright bass and ’50s record collection were just a front. They defiled swing’s squeaky clean image with the Ramones’ relentless speed and volume (not to mention their “Hey…

One afternoon, Brian Transeau received a phone call that would forever change his life, and without exaggeration, the nature of dance music all over the world. “I was making records out of my bedroom in Maryland, never having heard English club music, and came up with [my first album] IMA,”…

The Handsome Family’s Rennie Sparks has something to tell her fellow Americans. “I’m not weird!” she exclaims. “You only think I’m weird because you don’t want to admit you feel the same fucking way.” Europeans, by contrast, seem to understand the dark muse of this Chicago husband-and-wife goth-country duo a…

Punk rock is a lot of things. Loud, always. Fast, mostly. Angry, sometimes. Uplifting? Well, yeah. Actually, if it’s done well, it can be downright inspirational — firing up the engines of self-empowerment that typically lie dormant, or creating a political sounding board (whether to the left, right or center),…

A few weeks ago, Willie Nelson was the featured artist on the weekly PBS live-music show, Sessions at West 54th. Over the course of his hourlong performance, it slowly began to sink in that the petite blond vocalist to Nelson’s left was not your run-of-the-mill backup singer. It was Shelby…

Here’s where Josh Homme and the gang forget about their Stone Age evolution from Kyuss and start making the “Queen” part of the name count for something. Just like a baked version of Sheer Heart Attack, songs run together with no gaps in between, making each installment seem stranger than…

“Alternative music with a vision launches the musical trends of tomorrow” — what a noble philosophy! Once upon a time, many of us actually believed it, at least until the corporate world came in and bastardized the idea of an underground. But the folks at the staunchly independent Triple X…

In 1965-1966, it was still possible for a garage band to make the leap to Top 40 and back to obscurity all in the same year. These Sundazed reissues brilliantly capture that moment before the window of opportunity closed like an automatic garage door. With so little time to make…

On a quiet spring night several weeks ago, a radical metamorphosis took place within the normally placid confines of Tempe’s Arizona Roadhouse Brewery. The usual clientele — middle-class jeans-and-tee-shirt types — was replaced by an invasion of leather-and-metal-spike-clad, greasy haired hellions and young ladies wearing more makeup than clothing. As…

No one’s ever accused Sascha Konietzko, the man behind the now-dead KMFDM and the very much alive MDFMK, of suffering from incurable optimism. Since the ’80s, he’s made hard-as-nails electro/industrial music whose lyrics focus on topics such as inhumanity and anguish, not true love and thongs. But last year’s massacre…