It’d be reductive to call Madlib the last of hip-hop’s true jazz believers, but it’d be close to the truth. The Stones Throw Records studio rat may have become an all-star as the cartoon monster Quasimoto and one third of the massive Lootpack crew, but he’s gone hall-of-fame by embedding…
Serart is the fascinating debut collaborative art project from the gifted Armenian multi-instrumentalist Arto Tunc Boyaciyan and System of a Down lead vocalist Serj Tankian. Damn if it ain’t bangin’. You can ask my neighbors. I’ve listened to this record 15 times in the past three days, and now they’re…
Jazz lizards paid scant attention to Thelonious Monk’s 1960s Columbia releases. Where once Monk was revered as a revolutionary, fickle LBJ-era critics and enthusiasts had moved on to the pointy-headed and pompous sounds of Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor and others. The irony, of course, was that most of the “space…
What happens when the line between dystopia and the daily grind disappears? Is this indeed the robot-policed future that science fiction has been hinting at for decades? It is according to Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, but he seems surprisingly calm about it all. It’s a calm that infects the protagonists of…
We don’t normally pay much attention in these pages to happenings in Sedona, our lovely day trip to the north. The Sedona Cultural Park, though, booked itself a doozie of a show in its efforts to turn itself into an elite Western musical destination, much in the way Red Rocks…
Mark Oliver Everett, known to discriminating music fans everywhere as “E,” headmaster of Eels, is the guy everyone wanted to be friends with in high school. Blisteringly smart and deadly funny, he’s cool enough for the boys and cuddly enough to make the girls swoon. He’s a natural-born smart-ass. Everett’s…
There is an austerity to the Lifesavas that some will find off-putting or atypical of underground hip-hop acts. One skit on their debut album, Spirit in Stone, “Thuggity Skit,” clumsily parodies monosyllabic Southern rappers. On “Livin’ Time/Life Movement I,” Vursatyl proclaims, “We pro-life and we’re pro-longevity/Procreation/Produce/Provocative/And pro-prosperity,” while “State of…
If one strictly adheres to the tenets of the hipster Bible, which can be as narrow as Bush Republicanism, it is dogma that the Eagles sucketh. To say so comes as easy as shooting duck decoys in a wading pool with a bazooka. And from the group’s myriad excesses, the…
Deerhoof singer Satomi Matsuzaki’s ultra-high voice sounds something like what would come out of Wayne Coyne’s mouth if he weren’t a man. She is by turns Nico-cold and Hello Kitty naive, and her lyrics sound like bizarre, lost-in-the-translation Haiku. The experimental Bay Area band’s repetitive song fragments appear held together…
Just try to kick back with your favorite musical nonconformists: It ain’t no picnic. If Jello Biafra’s principled disdain for small talk doesn’t ruin it, then Jonathan Richman’s misplaced empathy for the comestibles will (“Lonely little coleslaw, ain’t got no friends . . .”). Meanwhile, Queens of the Stone Age…
You can’t fault Neil Young for trying. In his 1960s hit “Mr. Soul,” Young sang, “Is it strange I should change?” For anyone who’s followed the 58-year-old rocker’s career, the answer is an obvious “No!” In what may be his strangest career turn yet, Young is throwing to his audience…
My people smoke cigarettes, but they’re the brand of people I want to be around. More often than not, they’re not at all self-serious. They’re passionate about their lives, their environment, their friends, their recreation. In other words, smokers make great bar patrons. Now, I don’t smoke. I never have…
It’s a testament to the natural-born, arena-bred talents of Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn that no matter how many well-worn formal elements, humdrum lyrical bromides or suspect views on gender roles the pair pepper their popular brand of country music with, they nearly always end up producing some of Nashville’s…
While Adam Green’s counterpart in the très cool Moldy Peaches, Kimya Dawson, has taken a more serious route in her solo career, singing songs about anthrax and globalization, Green has retained the peachy playfulness on his second solo outing, Friends of Mine. And the “anti-folk” singer’s whimsy leads to the…
Read the other day that Macy Gray’s Id — the album, though what she sells is what she thinks — didn’t move because of its being released before the smoke cleared post-September 11; sorry, didn’t buy it (the excuse, not the disc, though come to think of it . …
Retrospective musical obsessions are a dicey proposition. When it comes to the decade between 1959 and 1969, Holly Golightly is undoubtedly obsessed. She has made a career as such — the prima donna protégée of Billy Childish who wears an adoration of rock ‘n’ roll’s formative years on her sleeve…
Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traveled 6,000 miles, braving starvation, frostbite and treacherous landscape to cross the continental divide on their way to the Pacific Ocean and back. In the minds of the modern indie-rock enthusiast, however, that’s nothing compared to the difficulty a darling of the genre faces…
The man formerly known as Daniel Dumile understands that today’s heroes come a dime a dozen, doused in bravado, drunk on morality, and that it’s all too easy to be cast as one. Wave a flag and a gun, fight the odds, grab the loot, perish spectacularly, or all of…
The local punk crowd erupted out of left field last week. Literally. The Vans Warped Tour, which since the late 1990s has become the U.S.’s prime traveling summer punk and ska showcase, routinely attracting stars of the genres (Rancid, Less Than Jake) as well as the artists pushing the noise…
That the Drive-By Truckers would be compared so widely to Lynyrd Skynyrd now is obvious. The band, fronted by Alabama expatriates Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, burst into critical consciousness two years ago with their Southern Rock Opera, a sprawling two-CD concept record that translated the Skynyrd tragedy into rumination…
Now that emo has proven itself capable of selling more records than can fit into the back of a van, major labels are stumbling over one another to sign up as many young acts as they can, gambling that a small but loyal audience in New Brunswick or Santa Cruz…
