Features

It’s difficult not to be struck by the similarity between Will Johnson and Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard. Both deploy their tender and wounded but still hopeful baritones within the hushed buzz of lo-fi environs, wrapping their oblique lyrical imagery around melodic tunes that seep melancholia like athletes drip sweat…

In between rubber-stamping generous tax cuts and murky homeland security measures, Congress recently found time to christen 2003 the “Year of the Blues.” You may have missed it, but PBS’s programming wizards did not. They are marking the event with a lavish, upcoming documentary series that celebrates the musical idiom…

Once upon a time, Cher was cool. No, really. She was cool. Long before she became an iconic cottage industry, Cher was a hippie chick folk singer whose naughty songs upset radio programmers and whose eye makeup terrified uptight parents. A full decade before the ’70s schlock of “Gypsies, Tramps…

The only thing shocking about Johnny Rotten these days is the fact that the notoriously smarmy Sex Pistols singer sounds like a finger-wagging grandpa at times. But c’mon, how’s Rotten going to scandalize anymore, now that swearing at people while spouting inflamed rhetoric is the stuff of navy-suit network news?…

Steve Trella fields requests for songs by Southern bands like the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker Band and the Outlaws every day. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Trella is an afternoon DJ for KSLX-FM, Phoenix’s classic rock station. Lots of listeners grew up on the rebel-flag-waving attitude…

If the fourth annual edition of the Latin Alternative Music Conference (LAMC) had taken place in New York as it had before, chances are it would have been destroyed by the blackout that hit the Northeast. Things in sunny Los Angeles, however, proved to be just as much in need…

Warren Zevon’s almost-certain final album sums up his eclectic career to fine effect. If that doesn’t make it any sort of masterpiece, well, then that’s no problem. Masterpieces weren’t his thing even in the best of times, and they certainly aren’t his stock in trade as he suffers from terminal…

Either Detroit-based R&B dude Dwele likes old standbys, or he’s one lazy bastard. Subject — his major-label “debut” album — is a revamped version of his actual debut, a self-produced, self-distributed 1998 release, Rize. Having the older songs re-sequenced and spread out robs Subject of the erotic, stream-of-consciousness flow of…

With a career that reaches back four decades — and with Bob Marley and Peter Tosh long dead — Jimmy Cliff may be the closest thing to a visible elder statesman that reggae music has to offer. Perhaps explosive mainstream success has eluded Cliff, but that hasn’t prevented him from…

Like singing sisters Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer (who witnessed their alcoholic father kill their mother), singer-songwriter Jimmy Wayne is a walking country song — the messed-up Merle Haggard kind, that is. He saw his stepfather shoot his stepsister three times, leaving her paralyzed. His mother was imprisoned (for what,…

To butcher an oft-coined phrase, writing about punk is like slam-dancing about astrophysics; the latter remains a far more compelling way to spend your weekend. Particularly since the word “punk” means nothing anymore, or, worse yet, seems to mean everything. Lord help us, it’s a “vibe,” an “aesthetic” now. You…

Crank up this album, with its ripping, Motörhead-hearted opener “It’s Gonna Be a Long Night” closely followed by the band’s trippy dippy salute to “Zoloft,” with feel-good platitudes and soothing helicopter sounds whooshing from speaker to speaker, and people’ll ask, “What the hell is this?” Tell them it’s Ween, and…

Listening to the first few tracks of Vast Low Cities, the debut release from San Francisco quartet Vervein, it might be easy to characterize the record as a collection of dainty down-tempo pop songs, enhanced by layers of ethereal female vocals that lull a listener into a pleasant, meditative state…

After two years of trailblazing work by incendiary artists like RJD2, Cannibal Ox, and label owner El-P, Definitive Jux has spent 2003 issuing work by the underground’s underdogs, hardworking MCs who have never earned their just due. As a freestyle animal familiar to New York heads, C-Rayz Walz falls into…

Where do aging pop-rockers with little cultural currency and a hankering for actual currency go when the major-label system fails them but selling CDs without the help of brick and mortar is still kind of complicated and stuff? They flock to them there indies, of course, where young acts with…

A veteran from the glory days of Blue Note Records, Jimmy Smith’s symphonic organ compositions have held a distinctly original space in jazz for a half-century. Smith helped shape modern jazz by copping solos from horn players and translating them on his Hammond B-3. Some keyboard players abandoned the old…

When an all-woman rock band sets up camp in the traditional rock ‘n’ roll boys’ club, it’s almost impossible to ignore the restrictive political status thrust automatically upon the band. Unless that band is Bella, a latter-day riot-grrrl trio from Mesa that doesn’t allow stereotypical dogma to strangle their creative…

The last time Jimmy Vespa and Bobby Lava Noxious did something they really didn’t want to do, they quit the Hypno-Twists, a band they helped start and watched as it slowly fell apart. Now the regrettable deed at hand is how to word the dreaded “Drummer Wanted” ad for their…

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