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…
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,…
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…
Fresh off a brain aneurysm, Neil Young gives the right wing an earful, clobbering our befuddled Decider-in-Chief with a righteous bitch slap that exceeds 40 minutes. Leave it to Johnny Rotten’s favorite hippie — a Canadian with health care, no less — to hold up the mirror, cluck his tongue…
Rjyan Kidwell, a.k.a. Cex, certainly knows how to keep listeners guessing. On his first few records, he adopted a white rapper persona and came across as a wittier and less violent Eminem; he then turned on a dime, picked up a laptop, and became an intelligent dance music composer who…
The side project is an established rock phenomenon. Distanced from the bread-and-butter band, one can engage in pursuits that might not fit the profile of the mother-ship group. The late Jerry Garcia played bluegrass banjo with Old & In the Way, and The Mekons’ Jon Langford played big rock riffs…
Indiana’s Murder By Death may draw from wild sources like Dante’s Inferno and Johnny Cash for inspiration, but we’re fairly certain that “Raw Deal,” off the newly released In Bocca al Lupo, has nothing to do with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Quite the opposite — on this latest album, the band delves…
Instituto Mexicano del Sonido (IMS) is a one-man type of project, with lots of after-hour editions and additions at a home computer. During the day, Camilo Lara is the well-known industry man and savvy record label guy who works for major companies in Mexico City. By night, he finds magic…
“No shoegazers here!” swoons Vibration singer Anne Fitzgerald on “Muscle Memory,” the lead-off tune from this Brooklyn band’s debut. Well, there might be a few boot-staring palookas in their audience, as most of Amarilla is raw, sauntering guitar churn and rolling drums, calling to mind moody early ’90s mashers like…
Maybe the only thing shocking about Madonna’s 2004 “Reinvention” tour was how completely unshocking it was, at least by her standards. No cone bustier, no simulated masturbation on a bed, no topless backup dancers (female ones, anyway) to writhe against . . . just a safe two-or-so hours of classic…
The old-school Brooklyn-based dance-punks in Radio 4 vividly illustrated their dissatisfaction with The Man on 2004’s pissed-off Stealing of a Nation, but they forgot to have any fun in the process, which made joining their underground resistance a very hard sell. Though it doesn’t match the punk-funk intensity of 2002’s…
Now that summer’s upon us, we have a dearth of entertainment options and the promise of sweaty afternoons spent waiting for the sun to drop below the horizon so that the concrete heat islands stop sizzling. Once the natural light has faded, though, there are still a few places you…
1. Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere (Downtown) 2. Peeping Tom, Peeping Tom (Ipecac Recordings) 3. Les Claypool, Of Whales & Woe (Prawn Song) 4. Tool, 10,000 Days (Volcano) 5. Blue October, Foiled (Universal/Motown Records) 6. Angels & Airwaves, We Don’t Need to Whisper (Universal/Geffen) 7. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stadium Arcadium…
This Windy City trio likes to lambaste pop-culture targets — especially the Warped Tour world it gets lumped into. Blame the clipped, bubblegum pop-punk drum sound and tempos the group has employed since its formation in ’99. But then the band members lay on slashing riffs and gruff vocals that…
You know Elvis Costello: angry young punk with talent to spare turned middle-aged (52 candles this summer) master collaborator. Preceding projects have promulgated an array of songwriting trysts (Bacharach and McCartney and wife Diana Krall, to name but a few) as well as orchestral dalliances with the Brodsky Quartet and…
Impatient ears will hear the pretty indie gloss of Camera Obscura and quickly dismiss it as twee chamber pop, but while the sextet’s sunny music pleases on contact, front woman Tracyanne Campbell has more on her mind than sweet refrains. While the galloping opener, “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken,”…
A vision of smeared red lipstick, smudgy eyeliner, and a cotton candy tangle of platinum hair, Theo Kogan was an early ’90s icon as the petulant, potty-mouthed front woman of all-girl punk band the Lunachicks, who ruled the New York club scene after the sea change of grunge unleashed a…
While mosh-inclined fans and occasional employment of screamo vocals often pigeonhole Seattle trio The Fall of Troy into the hardcore genre, the skill level of the barely legal members’ playing suggests that there is more to this group than circle pits and screeches. Guitarist Thomas Erak loops his uncontrollably speedy…
If Lyle Lovett is the thinking man’s Texas songwriter, Robert Earl Keen is the drinking thinking man’s Texas songwriter. Since the late ’80s, Keen’s cockeyed, barstool’s-eye view of life’s landscape has lured love from the alt-country set and diehard frat partyers in equal measure. Lumped in early on with the…
