Downtown L.A. during the Democratic National Convention has the eerie, abandoned feel of a circus after the tents have been collapsed. Standing in the shadow of the Staples Center, Stew and girlfriend Heidi Rodewald — bandmates in the Negro Problem — are checking out the activist pageant. Trudging along for…
Garage rock was not about taking rock ‘n’ roll and handing it to creepy label guys with shaky checkbooks. Nor was it about having your parents, teachers, priests and rabbis giving it the thumbs up. It was none of that. It was all about your own, about breathing some kind…
You just gotta do things. There was unfinished business with the Plimsouls and it still seemed like there was a lot of life in it. I just went for it,” says singer/songwriter Peter Case on what he was thinking when he re-formed his New Wave garage band nearly 15 years…
For those of you going through Survivor withdrawal, this month’s Mail or Muse has been conceived with your shallow needs in mind. If you ask us, that series signed off a few weeks too soon. What good is calling Richard Hatch a “survivor” and then shipping him home? Let him…
Maybe it’s his rubber-tight britches — pants so snug they’d make the Michelin Man squirm. Or maybe it’s his countrypolitan image and those knock-kneed maneuvers he’s made famous — Presleyan gyrations that make the ladies smile and the men snicker. Whatever the reason, despite his place as a trailblazer in…
If Phoenix is a place where gun shops outnumber bookstores, where your neighbor’s house could suddenly explode because a junior chemist bungled his meth lab starter kit and mixed too much Coleman 7 fuel with acetone, then, on likeness alone, the White Trash Debutantes should be huge here.They could be…
Musicians really shouldn’t do press if they don’t want their words to come back to haunt them. In the case of Seattle singer-songwriter Damien Jurado, he’ll be living with Nick Drake comparisons for some time; his frequent admission that Drake’s second release, 1970’s Bryter Layter, is one of his two…
Patty Larkin plays a hell of a guitar. Specifically, she plays a 1946 Martin D-18 acoustic, and if you don’t understand how cool that is, bad on ya. That was the era — up to the late 1940s — when Martin & Co. was making instruments that went far beyond…
Forget that the title of Spoozys’ freshman release is a hideous illiterate redundancy, like saying, “I’m wearing jeans pants and a tee shirt top.” Ignore the fact that the voices are buried so far down in the mix that trying to decipher the garbled lyrics is like tweezing loose eyelashes…
Ever since last year’s macrocomputer concept album EEVIAC, Man or Astro-Man? has been working off no known template. That is, if all you know about MOAM? is the surf revival stuff from its first albums on Estrus, you’ve missed out on some pretty important shifts in attitude. A Spectrum of…
From the opening white noise and chimes of Home Is Where You Hang Yourself’s title track, you’re immersed in a world where stuffed animals sit in smoke-filled rooms, one-eyed bunnies stare into empty shot glasses, and threadbare teddy bears mumble to themselves, all of them just wishing for a hug…
Tin Hat Trio blew up with the power and exuberance of a firestorm on last year’s recording debut Memory Is an Elephant. With an unlikely instrumental core of violin or viola (Carla Kihlstedt), accordion (Rob Burger) and acoustic six-string (Mark Orton), the Bay Area combo innovated genre-defying chamber music that…
You’ve heard it before. If it’s not the oldest cliché in the business, it’s the best-known: “We’re big in Europe.” “Big in Europe” — a phrase so ancient that it’s become a sort of all-purpose joke even to people outside the music industry — means you’re skirting the issue of…
Merle Haggard is contemplating quitting country music, and it’s your fault. The 63-year-old Haggard isn’t ready to walk away just yet. In fact, he’s about to embark on a two-month national tour to promote his biggest recording in more than a decade. Yet Haggard, if anything, is a realist. A…
Weezer has not released any new material in five years, yet its July show at Boston’s in Tempe sold out before most people heard the date had even been announced. A few weeks earlier, the group’s surprise appearance during the local leg of the Vans Warped Tour had folks freaking…
“Secure in my role of ‘band member,’ one-fifth of the roots-rock band the Picketts for the past 10 years,” writes Christy McWilson in her Hightone Records bio, “I always thought I’d step out in front of a firing squad before I’d step out on my own as a ‘solo artist.’…
Child Is the Father to Man, Blood, Sweat & Tears and The Chambers Brothers’ Time Has Come Today (Sony Legacy)
Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue occupies a lofty place in the eyes and ears of most jazz lizards. Many believe — make that know — it to be the greatest record of all time. But the 1959 album’s exalted status reaches far beyond goatee-sporting, cappuccino-sipping, finger-popping white hipsters. The famous…
In 1988, Penelope Spheeris released the amusing rock documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap is an almost perfect parody of Spheeris’ film, and Christopher Guest’s Nigel Tufnel is a perfect parody of Ozzy Osbourne’s persona in it. The only…
While the New Amsterdams are a Get Up Kids offshoot, the band doesn’t belong to the same dreaded indie subgenre as its emo-core parent. Instead, songwriter Matthew Pryor’s side project has plenty in common with that harbinger to all things sad-core, Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers album. Never You Mind evokes…
The people on Sally Taylor’s new independently released Apt. 6S fall in love or don’t, get drunk, move away, shoot pool, hang out in smoke-filled bars, call each other long distance to catch up and abandon each other on wedding days. In short, the usual run of random occurrences that…
Curt Kirkwood has a new project. The least surprising thing about this venture is that it’s based in Austin. And there’s more to it than the fact that his new bandmates are from there. And it’s not, as drummer Shandon Sahm quips, “because Texas has barbecues and death penalties.” Phoenix…
