Under the name Badly Drawn Boy, Damon Gough’s first album, The Hour of Bewilderbeast, was one of those works of shining brilliance that tend to haunt their creator, as critics often dash an artist’s every ensuing effort against that definitive debut. The ghost of Bewilderbeast rattles some chains on BDB’s…
Today’s rap game is suffocating in the stale humidity produced by a slew of blowhard MCs. As sweat seeps through its pores like slow lava, out of nowhere appears the Pharcyde with an ice-cold pitcher of Arnold Palmers and a platter of fresh fruit in the form of Humboldt Beginnings…
It seems fitting that Green Day’s latest album is titled American Idiot. After all, the band made its name — not to mention its millions — being as much. Self-deprecation aside, however, with Idiot, Green Day has somehow managed to pour syrup on yesterday’s Dookie and, incredibly, turned it into…
It’s amusing that a band that sets its sights so high with its name (Palomar is an observatory that houses one of the world’s biggest telescopes) ends up writing songs concerning earthly matters. But throughout the 14 tracks on Palomar III, the coed Brooklyn quartet contemplates everything from the Old…
It’s been a busy seven days for Grae. The songs give This Week a diary feel, illustrating conflicts, regrets, frustration, and loves lost. Grae’s flow streams out of her conscience, as if she’s having a revelatory dialogue with each listener. “P.S.” pours like gasoline dousing an old flame, and Grae’s…
Special Gunpowder is the first original recording from DJ /rupture, a producer who initially caused a stir with his 2001 mix tape, Minesweeper Suite. On that disc, he deftly blended everything from disco classics to hardcore techno and dub reggae tracks, earning widespread acclaim as one of the top DJs…
With The Dames’ new album blaring, we can’t help wanting to jump around wildly — we’re overcome with girl power, but not in the Spice Girls sense. Tagged “the demon spawn of The Donnas and Black Flag,” Phoenix’s all-female punk rock trio follows up last year’s Sin and Tonic with…
Mush is a Los Angeles indie label specializing in electronica deconstructionists, all with names that sound like overnight FM DJs. Among the acts on the Mush Tour lineup, Her Space Holiday comes closest to having conventional song structures — Marc Bianchi’s whispering delivery will spook out Elliott Smith fans waiting…
It would be wrong to dismiss Seattle’s Blood Brothers as a run-of-the-mill hardcore or punk band. Yes, singers Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney are capable of screams and screeches more grating than Godzilla’s nails on a giant chalkboard. But it doesn’t take a genius to see the group’s penchant for…
The most amazing thing about this British quartet’s second album is that it got made at all, considering how co-singer/guitarist Pete Doherty has spent the last two years getting nicked for drugs and switchblades, being jailed for burglarizing his bandmate’s flat, and being shipped off to rehab for heroin and…
Tom Waits is back, and he’s a little hard to love. The man capable of writing a ballad as fragile as a convict’s conscience just wants to make the sonic equivalent of a dirty bomb. The result is an album full of wicked foot-stompers, riddled with minor-key buzzmuffle and drenched…
If you have to rip someone off, at least shoot for the good shit. New York City’s the Exit picks some great bands to plagiarize, but oddly enough, the trio covets its victims’ more lackluster work: U2’s October, the Police’s Synchronicity, Bad Brains’ I Against I. One man’s trash, though,…
It’s difficult to overstate the impact of De La Soul’s debut release, 3 Feet High and Rising. Spawned by a thriving New York scene with artists such as KRS-One, Kool Moe Dee and Big Daddy Kane, De La Soul took rap in a different direction, eschewing the heavily funk and…
There aren’t but a few guitarists from the ’80s underground with the skill of Dave Alvin, and none with the versatility. Whether leading punkabilly rockers The Blasters, playing with gothic-punkers The Flesheaters, standing in for Billy Zoom as guitarist for L.A. punk originals X, or forging his own catalogue of…
If you’ve sat alone in a Starbucks, if you’ve wandered aimlessly in a Borders bookstore, if you’ve gone shopping anywhere after 9 p.m., you’ve probably been quietly assaulted by Norah Jones’ octa-Grammy-winning music and perhaps felt like you should be home doing something nice for yourself (the similar comfort zones…
Slithering around and wiggling in shiny shirts to house music is all right, and bouncing up and down in your Sean John gear to remixes of Fat Joe’s “Lean Back” isn’t a bad way to kill an evening, but sometimes you just need to push the envelope and spazz the…
They didn’t put Aberdeen on the musical map with their 1987 debut — it took Nirvana to do that. All the same, the Melvins’ place in rock cultdom is assured for being the first post-punks to make it safe to like slow and plodding metal bands like Black Sabbath. Arguably,…
Finally, a reason to break out those checkerboard creepers that have been gathering dust in the back of your closet since the mid-’90s third-wave ska revival! New York City’s Toasters are honest-to-goodness American ska pioneers, and they’ve stayed true to the genre’s Jamaican R&B roots while many of their peers…
Kimya Dawson was half of the Moldy Peaches, the New York City-based anti-folk supergroup she formed with Adam Green in the late ’90s. The Peaches merged primitive guitar whacking with lyrics that gloried in childlike obscenities. “Who’s Got the Crack?” was a surprise hit in England, but the self-imposed naivet…
Junior Brown is a country artist — if you still think country means drinkin’, cheatin’ and hard-core honky-tonk music — but his omnivorous musical appetite and monster chops defy easy categories. Down Home Chrome opens with “Little Rivi-Airhead,” a Beach Boys-meets-Ernest Tubb rocker that also tips its cowboy hat to…
Nancy Sinatra doesn’t want to be Debbie Harry or Marianne Faithfull or even Nick Cave. Fact is, everybody wants to be Nancy Sinatra. And, it turns out, not the Nancy of Boots and Sugartown and all those Lee Hazlewood numbers, but the Nancy who lives today, apparently undiminished in attitude…
Emerg McVay’s a one-man verbal blitzkrieg, a black Osama bin Laden piloting a lyrical 747 right into the core of your cranium. Preconceived notions? Kick ’em to the curb, yo. Especially if you think that P-town can’t blow up like ATL, the Lou, and Chi-town before it. Just listen to…
