There are a lot of odd and brow-furrowing ways to make it as an artist in the music business, from American Idol and its imitators to battles of the bands like the Bodog Battle of the Bands that the gambling Web site www.bodog.com’s founder Calvin Ayre is sponsoring. (It’s online…
She’s been branded everything from tortured and bruised to moody and difficult, but right now, Fiona Apple just has a case of the sniffles. Talking on the phone from her Venice, California, home, the much-praised, much-embattled singer/songwriter/pianist is lying low, preparing to embark on the biggest concert tour of her…
The two years since The Walkmen released their critically hailed second album, Bows + Arrows? Pure joy. The New York City band enjoyed every bit of a lengthy world tour, and along the way, the five members — singer-guitarist Hamilton Leithauser, guitarist Paul Maroon, bassist Walter Martin, drummer Matt Barrick,…
Steve Albini, arguably the most influential and prolific recording engineer in the history of “alternative” music, has left his sonic signature on more than a thousand albums, including the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa; PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me; Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile; Flogging Molly’s Swagger; and Nirvana’s In Utero. He’s…
The lousy CD cover to Knives in the Attic’s 5 song EP, Death Pop, does it a great disservice. Sure, the blood-spattered, knifed teddy bear doodle fits the angst/death-obsessed lyrics, but it comes off amateurish. And this is a band that should be in the midst of a bidding war,…
This furious five-piece came kicking out of Denton, Texas, five years ago as a rock-’em-sock-’em reaction to their burg’s then-burgeoning prog-emo scene (see At the Drive-In). Despite some Fugazi guitar chops similar to their Denton peers, the Gamblers’ preference was to rock out like the MC5. Endless touring and label-hopping…
If you thought that The Stills were initially lumped into the same scene as Interpol and the Walkmen because of timing rather than musical similarities, the quintet cements that notion on Without Feathers. More Radiohead than Rapture, Feathers finds the Montreal band more interested in creating expansive soundscapes than in…
Many notable artists shuffle off this mortal coil, only to endure the usual posthumous “previously unheard release” cash-in attempts. The superlative Personal File is far from that. File is a collection of voice-and-guitar-alone performances from 1973 to 1976 and the early ’80s found in storage at the House of Cash…
With a fearsome wheezing and creaking, the highly anticipated second installment of Ann Arbor, Michigan, producer Dabrye’s trilogy, Two/Three, sounds more like an infernal machine than the feel-good hit of the summer. Dabrye builds on the bleak, industrial sound scrapes of producers like the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA by adding somber…
“Thank you to members of the media for coming today. As press secretary for country-pop superstars Kenny Chesney and Carrie Underwood, I’d like to clear up two points of confusion before taking questions regarding the pair’s U.S. summer tour. First: In seeking to annul her four-month marriage to Chesney last…
Stanley Dural’s blend of styles — including (gasp!) pop — may have once raised hackles among aficionados of southwestern Louisiana accordion boogie, but it’s also an open door, for us non-purists, to the bright colors of zydeco, America’s most cheerful traditional music. Anyone who’s heard the swinging, bubbly style that…
DJ AM has built his reputation on being the DJ for anything celeb-related, so we suppose it’s appropriate that he’s the featured act at this Thursday’s Axis Hollywood. Yeah, you read that right — Axis Hollywood is what the promoters are calling Thursdays at Axis in Scottsdale (7340 East Indian…
Nobody wants to be the fifth wheel, but as the fifth Beatle, Billy Preston was the musical lube that kept the high-strung Let It Be sessions from slipping off the rails. When the prodigiously Afroed keyboardist died of kidney failure on Tuesday, June 6, it came as no surprise to…
Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell have been down the reinvention road before. Back when they were the core of British shoegazers Slowdive, the pair concluded that the noisy, swirling sound they’d helped advance was a creative dead-end and they’d better try something different. The result? 1995’s much-maligned Pygmalion, an ambient,…
Thursday 15Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: DJ Red (hip-hop, dance) Axis/Radius: Axis Hollywood with DJ AM (hip-hop, rock) Barcelona: DJ Rob (dance) The Bunkhouse: DJ Doom (dance) Club Central: DJs Ernie G. (hip-hop, R&B) & Luis (salsa, merengue) The Crown Room: DJ Gable (rock, house, hip-hop) e4: Limelight with DJ Tranzl8r (rock…
Recently I was at a show at the Real Bar early in the evening, when the young’uns are out to rock. A two-person band had just finished its set when a crowd of tween and early teen kids with screamo hair (long bangs in their faces, cut short in the…
How did you spend your day of reckoning? Expectant mothers, fearful of a 06/06/06 due date, were asking doctors to induce labor a day or two early to spare their babies from the mark of the beast, which would not only adversely affect those terrible twos, but could keep the…
They ain’t weary and they ain’t boys, but they are the Weary Boys, a handful of Humboldt County, California, escapees who got up one day, stretched, and decided to pack up the ’87 Buick Century and drive to Austin, Texas, sight unseen. “It seemed like a nice place to want…
By all rights, Stiff Little Fingers should suck. What was once perhaps the best band of punk’s second wave is down to a sole original member (although a second, bassist Ali McMordie, returned to the fold earlier this year) and, since the early 1990s, has seemingly been cashing in on…
You’ve gotta love the contradictory impulses at work in the title, a clever enjoining of modesty and arrogance emblematic of Sonic Youth’s attitudes and recordings for the better part of the band’s quarter-century run. Rather Ripped is a perfect name choice in literal terms relating to its content — the…
Kill Rock Stars is owned by a man named Slim Moon who has better taste in music than you do. His ears are irrefutably sharp: The KRS roster is a dense handbook on indie-underground innovators and breakthrough wonders ranging from Sleater-Kinney and Elliott Smith to The Gossip and Xiu Xiu…
Regina Spektor’s tricky tongue and fading Russian accent separate her from the ever-expanding crowd of Tori Amos/Fiona Apple wanna-bes who sport “funky” hats and own well-worn piano stools. Begin to Hope might be less histrionic than 2004’s Soviet Kitsch, but it’s still great fun to bear witness to this NYC…
