San Francisco resident Topher Lafata has the same bright idea lots of other former indie-rockers are riding these days: Ditch the electric guitars, mopey breakup songs and human drummers that the mid-’90s proved could be so useful and feed all that pent-up postgrad angst into the computer instead, sharpening a…
With artists increasingly mining the base elements of hip-hop — beats and rhymes — and channeling them through electronica’s synthetic DNA, is it any surprise that we’ve now christened the term “post-hip-hop”? With their respective takes on the concept, Prefuse 73’s One Word Extinguisher and A Grape Dope’s Missing Dragons…
Damon Albarn, lead singer of the Brit-pop band Blur, hasn’t made it much of a secret that he’s unhappy with his act’s lack of U.S. success. Initially, the only blip it made on the U.S. music radar was a media bitching match against Oasis, who shared a mutual disdain for…
These Bastards earned permission to use the Man in Black’s name from Johnny Cash himself, and while they are not really his blood, they do offer up a nice helping of working-class outlaw country that some of Johnny’s cronies ably could have made in the 1970s. While BSOJC have taken…
Jim James answers his cell phone on a very windy Sterling, Colorado, evening, about 140 miles from his band My Morning Jacket’s next gig in Boulder during a stop to get some grub. The limited food choices find the band settling for self-explanatory diner Country Kitchen. James, bandleader, songwriter and…
Good Charlotte is the punk band named after a kids’ book. Its young fans know Black Flag only as something that kills roaches. So it’s no wonder critics dismiss Good Charlotte’s anthemic pop as child’s play. In a number of ways, it is. “This song is dedicated to every kid…
On the newly released DVD Meat Puppets Alive in the Nineties, there’s a particularly alive moment from the early ’80s that Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore fondly remembers. “I had heard they were rambling across the country in a van and playing doughnut shops and they were coming to New York…
About 15 minutes into their set at the new Marquee Theatre in Tempe last Tuesday, Idaho guitar ambassadors Built to Spill blasted into “The Plan,” a bombastic, subtly melodic rocker. As 700 fans or so looked on, lead singer and ax man Doug Martsch sang the lyric, “The plan means…
Let’s face it: Retro culture is pretty silly. No one will ever recapture a feeling, much less the gestalt, of an entire era with a bygone ‘do, ancient pants, or an evocative guitar effect. In music, the best way to play the retro game and not end up a prisoner…
This debut EP clocks in at just over 15 minutes, but it drops an explosively powerful sonic chunk, a melding of ’90s garage rock and ’70s Southern boogie. Despite its brevity, it may be one of the best rock releases of the year. The Nashville-based Kings of Leon all answer…
If you’re skeptical that a superstar DJ such as Germany’s Timo Maas can’t produce solid dance music on his own, you may well be right — but at least Maas (unlike some of his peers) has the good sense to freely admit that he doesn’t work alone. While he handles…
The greater Washington-Baltimore area has certainly been involved in a lot of tension-filled, white music since Minor Threat’s hard-core declarations threw up a flag of protest over Chocolate City and one of America’s R&B capitals. And can you blame the I-95ers? Even youthful rebellion in the shadows of the seat…
While Christina Aguilera sufficiently undermined a respectable (if not quite illustrious) first outing with last year’s unfortunate Stripped, a follow-up that tried to out-pink Pink, Justin Timberlake merged independence and accessibility on Justified, his confident, engaging, mature solo debut after so much *NStink. Anyone with a fondness for Off the…
If you’ve been basking in the glow of grease oozing from your glad-they-renamed-’em “freedom” fries the past few months, find something else to do. Not just because the computer popsters (pop stars?) of DAT Politics come from Lille, a rough, industrial city from the French-Belgian border, and are thus quite…
For 40 bucks, you can buy a device that emits some of the most irritating and beautiful sounds imaginable, a device that not only presents an international kaleidoscope of opinion, but also receives secret spy transmissions. Best of all, every time you turn it on, the thing behaves differently, depending…
In “The Driveby,” one of several side-splitting skits on storied hip-hop producer Prince Paul’s clever new concept album Politics of the Business, Paul finds himself confronted on the street by a hyper, exasperated fan. “I did the worm, man. I used to break-dance, man. I fuckin’ popped, locked and rocked,…
While the music business goes about choosing its acts like a high school popularity contest, music’s ranks of losers, loners and sensitive souls continue to prove true art is borne of greater hardship than bad hair days and poor fashion sense. Looking more like members of the truckers’ local than…
Okay, no surprise here: The rush-released American Idol Season 2: All-Time Classic American Love Songs, one of the worst albums in recent memory, debuted earlier this month at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. There’s plenty to scoff at here, from the laughably heart-stricken rendition of Journey’s “Open…
The Thorns have the sort of name that these days can attract a considerable ground swell of interest among young record-buyers: a definite article in front of a one-syllable plural noun that features a prominent long vowel. Last year the formula worked for the Hives, the Vines and the Strokes,…
The United States’ latest ventures abroad prove that our country is far better at combating cultures than at mixing with them. So perhaps it makes sense that three dudes from our favorite scapegoat nation should remind us about the art of the enlightened blend. Having already sold a half-million copies…
Darryl Worley’s song “Have You Forgotten?” attempts to split the patriotic difference between Toby Keith and Alan Jackson, waving the flag while showing some class, to erratic effect. The country star deserves points for rhyming “forgotten” and “bin Laden” (it’s certainly better than, say, “income-tax deduction” and “weapons of mass…
Come on — stop that Noize! Firmly in the “what th . . .” category, Quiet Riot has decided to tour, gracing us at, you guessed it, the Mason Jar with its wacky homogenized heavy metal. Quiet Riot is basically famous for two reasons: losing founding guitarist Randy Rhoads to…
