It’s a sticky Saturday evening on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and the CMJ Rock Hall Music Fest is in full swing. Head Automatica lead singer Daryl Palumbo wanders into the Record Revolution music store, wearing a scruffy tee. He flips through a trove of obscure DVDs and CDs…
I. Introduction Were I to saunter up to a podium and announce, through the condescending gaze of a monocle, that “Two-piece bands are really hot right now!” you might just roll your eyes and leave my lecture hall. Of course two-piece bands are hot right now. They’ve been hot for…
Ben Lee, the pop bard of Bondi, Australia, used to be known as that kid from punk band Noise Addict. Then he was known as Claire Danes’ boyfriend (and then as Danes’ ex). These days, he’s just Ben again, touring his ass off and churning out pop numbers as buoyant…
For me, coming up country was difficult under the auspices of Willie Nelson. This young buckaroo in south Texas received all sorts of life lessons and mixed messages from the Red Headed Stranger over the years, from the warning “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” to…
To be completely blunt about it, ubiquity isn’t really an asset when it comes to playing around town. It’s good to have your name out there, to be recognizable. But if I see your name or your band’s name in the music section’s ads week after week for years, I’m…
Quintron and Miss Pussycat make happy music. Granted, it sounds very raw and punk. Quintron, a veritable one-man band who can pound on drums (or rather, a contraption he calls a “drum buddy”), play the organ, and sing simultaneously, produces records that sound as if they were made in a…
Who would’ve imagined that a poke in the eye during a pickup basketball game would have a profound effect on Doug Martsch’s life and music career? The Built to Spill front man didn’t think much of it when he sustained the injury earlier this year. An eventual trip to a…
What’s in a name? Depends, when your name is Elmo Kirkwood. At 22, he’s the singer and guitarist for locals Broken Robot. But his musical legacy is much older: Elmo’s the son of Meat Puppets guitarist Curt Kirkwood and nephew of troubled Puppets bass player Cris Kirkwood. “I was in…
If they ever again shoot a capsule into space containing artifacts designed to explain life on Earth to other worlds, they’ll have to make room on board for all 12 volumes of Hip-Hop Essentials. It’s hard to imagine a better explanation of hip-hop for an alien culture. Covering the years…
Independence Day is here again. Turns out we’ve been free for almost 230 years, which is a pretty kick-ass record when you think about it. So what is it that makes America . . . you know . . . America? Well, the best way to solve that mystery is…
In case you haven’t figured it out after all these years, Joan Jett is still the “tough girl.” When her name is mentioned in print, that phrase always follows, like magic, by rote. In an e-mail interview with New Times, Jett has her own take on the pigeonhole she first…
While we’d like to believe that some good things don’t have to come to an end, Batter the Drag, one of the most innovative (and snarkiest) Tempe bands in recent years, is calling it quits after releasing its first LP, The Big Sleep, early this year. New Times shared a…
Few things sicken me as much as band-reunions-for-cash, whether it’s the Sex Pistols’ appropriately named Filthy Lucre tour a few years back or the constant barrage of ’70s outfits like Black Sabbath hitting the stage again. I saw the Sabbath reunion its first year at Ozzfest, in 1997, and it…
From the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission Web site: DID YOU KNOW? White sturgeon are the largest freshwater fish in North America and can weigh over 1,500 pounds, be 20 feet in length, and live for over 100 years. !!! We had no idea. But Les Claypool certainly does. Claypool…
Born in Communist Georgia, where she played “I Want to Break Free” on air guitar, raised in Belfast, where she fell in love with the singer-songwriter aesthetic, and a certified pop star in the U.K. before the age of 20, Katie Melua quite literally burst onto the music scene by…
“Some songwriters are extremely sensitive about any liberties being taken with their songs,” says Dave Alvin. “God forbid you should touch some guitar part that had nothing to do with the melody or the lyrics.” Alvin himself is not so protective of his own tunes: “This is my address; the…
There are a lot of odd and brow-furrowing ways to make it as an artist in the music business, from American Idol and its imitators to battles of the bands like the Bodog Battle of the Bands that the gambling Web site www.bodog.com’s founder Calvin Ayre is sponsoring. (It’s online…
She’s been branded everything from tortured and bruised to moody and difficult, but right now, Fiona Apple just has a case of the sniffles. Talking on the phone from her Venice, California, home, the much-praised, much-embattled singer/songwriter/pianist is lying low, preparing to embark on the biggest concert tour of her…
The two years since The Walkmen released their critically hailed second album, Bows + Arrows? Pure joy. The New York City band enjoyed every bit of a lengthy world tour, and along the way, the five members — singer-guitarist Hamilton Leithauser, guitarist Paul Maroon, bassist Walter Martin, drummer Matt Barrick,…
Steve Albini, arguably the most influential and prolific recording engineer in the history of “alternative” music, has left his sonic signature on more than a thousand albums, including the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa; PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me; Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile; Flogging Molly’s Swagger; and Nirvana’s In Utero. He’s…
Nobody wants to be the fifth wheel, but as the fifth Beatle, Billy Preston was the musical lube that kept the high-strung Let It Be sessions from slipping off the rails. When the prodigiously Afroed keyboardist died of kidney failure on Tuesday, June 6, it came as no surprise to…
Recently I was at a show at the Real Bar early in the evening, when the young’uns are out to rock. A two-person band had just finished its set when a crowd of tween and early teen kids with screamo hair (long bangs in their faces, cut short in the…
