While you can credit (or blame) The Pixies for kicking off this whole reunion thing of the past couple of years, it’s nice to see the trend extending beyond just graying college-rock outfits (and a few ’70s arena-rock groups, too). Now back from the band graveyard is Nitzer Ebb, the…
One can’t help but chuckle at the Red Elvises’ appropriation of cheesy American culture — the colorful bow-tie tuxedos, the lopsided pompadours, singer Igor Yuzov’s lounge-lizard panache. The band’s flair for fusing Russian folk music with American surf, rockabilly, and even disco led to interesting concoctions like “I Wanna See…
Long before mall punk bands like Fall Out Boy and New Found Glory were all the panic at the disco, there was a time in the ’80s when punk fans were often called “fags” and targeted for ass-kickings by jocks and good ol’ boys. So it made sense in 1982…
Holy crap — Cyndi Lauper is 53 years old! This bit of trivia is shocking but true. The girl who just wanted to have fun is all grown up now. Somehow she managed to survive the ’80s, but the same cannot be said for some of her decade-of-decadence contemporaries (whatever…
If you want to see the best and brightest of the Valley’s turntablist scene (without having to hit up a dozen different nightclubs), beat feet down to this ginormous rave and music shindig at the Icehouse, 429 West Jackson Street, on Friday, September 22. In addition to appearances by Philly’s…
Bob Dylan sang “to live outside the law you must be honest.” Waylon Jennings covered Dylan on his first independent album, cut in Phoenix in 1964. His sound was born here, and it was here that he died, in February 2002, but the Texas-born Jennings was known as the Nashville…
It doesn’t sound like Murder Time. There’s no screaming. No tension. No sign of a struggle. The opening track, “It’s One Thing,” starts off sounding like the kind of thing old prog-rock bands were doing in the ’80s — big, dramatic keyboards offset by the muscular chunkity-chunk of metallic guitar…
Before we even marinated our eardrums to Hot Concrete — the Drunken Immortals’ third full-length album that’s out to steal your mind with positive hip-hop vibrations and community-building lyrics — there was already word on the street that it was hot shit. You see, this seven-piece, live hip-hop groove machine…
Albums without lyric sheets can frustrate fans who want to memorize the words they’re singing and pore over their poetic meanings. But with Lambchop, it’s best not to worry about such specifics; this melancholy country-operatic Nashville collective led by Kurt Wagner has always expressed itself more sublimely in its baroque…
If the creepy painting on the cover of Xiu Xiu’s The Air Force is supposed to depict singer-songwriter Jamie Stewart as Jesus, it’s ironic at best: Unlike the traditional singer-songwriter — who plays a guitar and makes sense of the chaos of our lives by making sense of his/her own…
Not many kids can say their high school band touched off a major-label bidding war. But it was after leaving Radish in the lurch at 17 that indie whiz-kid Ben Kweller made good on the hype with Freak Out, It’s Ben Kweller, the first in a four-part series of increasingly…
Blowfly’s Punk Rock Party is so filthy Tipper Gore might spontaneously combust if anyone ever played it for her. The original nasty rapper’s new album is scandalous, obscene and hilarious. Blowfly, the 60-year-old pervert with a penchant for performing in shiny capes and masks, has been doing dirty for a…
Some musicians maintain legendary rivalries for decades on end — try getting Sting and Stewart Copeland to bury the hatchet and you’ll see what we mean. Very rarely, though, is a band’s epic enmity so huge it can carry a feature-length art-house documentary like 2004’s Dig!, which chronicles the Dandy…
The most Elvis-like country performer since Elvis, Dwight Yoakam established his cred as a country traditionalist when he kicked off his first major-label release with a spirited cover of “Honky Tonk Man,” a Johnny Horton classic from the ’50s. Two great albums later, Yoakam topped the country charts with “Streets…
A little more than 10 years ago, I actually proposed to my girlfriend at a Southern Culture on the Skids New Year’s Eve show in New Jersey. Why not, I figured — there was the onstage limbo contest, the fried chicken the band threw into the crowd, SCotS’ kitschy slow-dance…
While he might not be as famous as Morrissey or Johnny Marr, bassist and guitarist Andy Rourke was still a vital part of legendary English rockers The Smiths. Handling his bass like a warbling weapon of twang, Rourke added his distinctive sound to such classic Smiths albums as The Queen…
The best way to describe EastonAshe’s sound is “adult contemporary rock.” The Cave Creek-based band has a mature sound, audible in rich compositions like “Bayou Blues,” which doesn’t utilize the 12-bar guitar progressions in E major or A major like many songs labeled as “blues,” but instead features hand-clap percussion…
Massive Attack’s Robert del Naja, a.k.a. 3D, was initially known not as a musician, but as a teenage graffiti artist — yet his connection to Bristol’s underground naturally attracted him to the Wild Bunch, a DJ-driven sound system that paid homage to the Jamaican party-givers whose impromptu toasts helped birth…
This split CD from indie rock duo Less Pain Forever and pop/electronica twosome Peachcake begins with Less Pain Forever encouraging you to “Throw Yer Babies.” The leadoff track not only has LPF’s usual quirky synths and Zappa-esque vibe, but also contains lyrics like “The fire on the mountain is a…
The best Album Leaf album, Seal Beach, distinguished itself in two ways: The songs were all instrumentals, and the record was only an EP. On his subsequent full-length efforts, The Album Leaf’s Jimmy LaValle has further cultivated an introspective, expansive style of tranquil electronica, but the discs’ longer running times…
Gnawing your way through the latest Mars Volta record is always something of a chore at first. The band, anchored by instrumentalist/composer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and lyricist/vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala, turns out huge mind-fucks as songs, mixing prog-metal, psychedelia, and swaggering Latin flavors into massive, album-long narratives whose intent is to confound…
Trucks of the United Nations, you’re on notice — Dave Mustaine, guitarist/singer/czar of Megadeth, is calling you out. “I was watching TV and saw the trucks that said ‘U.N.’ on them and said, ‘Man, you are so uncool, ineffective, anything,'” Mustaine said in a recent Billboard interview. And if Mustaine’s…
