Devendra Banhart’s debut is a mixture of song fragments, whistles, handclaps, chants, and some of the most oddly affecting, full-blown songs you may hear all year. Recorded on four-track and occasionally on ye olde answering machine the music rolls out slowly and sometimes abrasively, jarring listeners with high-pitched vocals and…
Red-headed Lena Katina and brown-haired Julia Volkova are t.A.T.u., two Russian teenagers who may or may not be lesbians involved in a steamy underage relationship; 200 km/h in the Wrong Lane, their English-language debut, is scorched-earth teen-exploitation pop nearly as good as “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “Leader of the Pack.”…
The New York-based dance label Ultra excels at neat summations of current electronic-music fads: Its recent electroclash compilation pitted young nü-wavers like Chicks on Speed and Fischerspooner against their stalwart ’80s antecedents, and its new trance set, though by definition creatively atrophied, condenses all the big-room exhilaration that scene has…
Evidently, a healthy single and a few well-placed guest turns are enough to spark a full tour these days. Erykah Badu, whose late 2000 album Mama’s Gun is a brilliant old-school soul turn but by now is very, very outdated, is coming to Club Rio in Tempe, ostensibly on the…
A person can’t be too careful when it comes to calling another person by his right name, especially when he has several. Hank Williams III was born Shelton, which is what his good friend and fellow country singing rebel Wayne “the Train” Hancock calls him. Others call him “Hank 3,”…
When Brent Best laughs, it sounds like the slide racking on a shotgun. Sounds that way when he coughs, too. Sometimes when he sings. It’s a little worse than usual; he and his band, Slobberbone, toured Europe for a few weeks and just returned home. Road life means late nights…
Halfway through a party thrown by Waylon Jennings’ family at the Rhythm Room in Phoenix last week, I swear the old man’s honky-tonk spirit appeared. Jessi Colter, Jennings’ widow, sat at a white piano. She played Elvis Presley’s achy-breaky blues number “One Night.” “One night with you/Is what I’m praying…
Nas runs, it seems, on two themes loss and the reclamation of former glory. With God’s Son, the Queens rapper plagued by a lack of focus for years makes those themes indistinguishable, finally meeting the challenge of Illmatic, his 1994 masterpiece and albatross as he struggled through mediocrity. Conceptually, the…
So I was in Tower Records the other day, and I saw that System of a Down has a new CD out called Steal This Album!. Since its last one was kind of a letdown, certainly not worth the full $17 list price, I figured, “What the fuck? I’ll crotch…
If nothing else, DJ Quik is responsible for “Safe + Sound,” the greatest, most emblematic gangsta-rap chorus of all time: “Some believe in Jesus/And some believe in Allah/But niggas like me/Believe in makin’ dollaz.” But if you think that’s all he has to say, the rest of this collection compiled…
Damn if Big Silver’s unassuming pub rock doesn’t sneak into your bloodstream and strengthen with each listen, until your head is swimming. And it’s not just the Arkansas quintet’s musical subtlety that makes it seem like an undercover operation: In Bizarro World, their hidden gem of a self-titled 2001 debut…
If Rainville were a place, rather than Colorado’s best alt-country band as voted by readers of the Denver Post it would be warm and familiar, the kind of place where even feeling bad feels good. The four-piece band hauls its “gritty rural rock mixed with swampy blues, old-school country and…
Tucson’s Greyhound Soul has the right to bitch and moan that it’s being passed over. Signed to a small European label, 808 Records, the band has been grinding out bluesy rock ‘n’ roll for years now. Its alternating six-member lineup fills most local stages as its big sound saturates the…
In the aftermath of a national calamity, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that 2002 was a weird year for music. The public wanted to disavow the trends of the past; those, after all, were empty, shallow and indicative of a culture in the dustbin. We needed meaning now…
Ryan Adams had the best quote of the year for elitist tastemakers. “I spent the ’80s looking for alternatives to what was already happening,” he said, atoning for his late-blooming love of Madonna singles and John Hughes flicks. “And now I’m going back and putting together the pieces of what…
2002 was a good year for R&B and hip-hop but only if you shunned commercial radio, corporate music magazines, MTV, BET and all other mainstream media hype-dolloping outlets. If you sought good music on your own, there was a nice bounty there for the taking. 1. The Neptunes ruled the…
Like fellow punk forebears the Ramones last year, the Clash, which dissolved amid drug abuse and splintering musical agendas in the mid-1980s, found itself among the list of 2003 inductees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As part of the March induction, Joe Strummer, his long-estranged songwriter partner…
Chicago-born MC Common (a.k.a. Lonnie Lynn) has been a standard bearer for the Native Tongues’ progressive style of hip-hop for years. During that time, he’s been celebrated for his intelligent lyrics and his rejection of hip-hop’s rampant misogyny, although his occasional incongruous bouts of homophobia have been disconcerting. His 2000…
Once upon a time, way back in the early ’90s, a clan called Wu-Tang formed, with GZA “at the head.” Two years after its seminal 1993 debut, Enter the Wu-Tang, the Clan issued its twin classics: Method Man’s Tical and GZA’s Liquid Swords. Each album placed urban and kung fu…
Cry, the fifth album by country singer Faith Hill, opens with loud drums, throbbing electric bass and a screeching guitar. The song is called “Free,” and it’s about liberating oneself from the chains of the past. The point is obvious: Hill wants to shed her Nashville image out with fiddles…
Mook rock may now have its own Smash Mouth a marginal band armed with buffalo-butt riffs and urban attitude that somehow outlives one-hit wonder and sticks to the roof of radio’s mouth like peanut butter. Crazy Town burst into modern-rock playlist permanence two years ago with “Butterfly,” catchier than any…
Now that they’ve busted up, like pumpkins smashed on curbs the night after Halloween, it’s time to admit that most everything post-Siamese Dream was overrated by the kids who found much meaning in bald Billy’s dreary fart-rock; look, when the words don’t say nothin’, they don’t mean nothin’. Tried giving…
