For a media whore like John Vanderslice, 15 stinkin’ minutes probably aren’t enough. “I think a lot of bands are afraid of publicity,” says the 33-year-old indie rocker from Bethesda, Maryland, who presently resides in San Francisco. “[They’re] afraid that they’re prostrating themselves. Like they’re not supposed to be looking…
Summer is a lovely time to catalogue worthlessness. Particularly one’s own. The pitiless heat is wonderful in helping clarify feelings of futility and defeat. Long, bitter months stewing in your own stink is time well-suited for detailing a hatred of everybody and everything. The summers around here reflect my inner…
Fall, ’76: Blue Öyster Cult is sitting pretty in the Top 20 with “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” The brainy Long Island quintet once pitched somewhat inaccurately to consumers as “the American Black Sabbath” has already consolidated a formidable live reputation and is now enjoying the fruits of nearly a decade…
Sometimes it’s less dangerous to be an honest-to-God revolutionary than to quietly redraw boundaries. Eve, a.k.a. Eve of Destruction, has had to shoulder more than her share of next-big-thing hype ever since her 1999 debut album Let There Be Eve . . . Ruff Ryder’s First Lady. And first lady…
Stake a place near the front of the stage at Nita’s Hideaway on Saturday to see a guy trying hard to define himself playing music that works against that.A self-styled Paul Westerberg type, young media darling Pete Yorn’s debut album, musicforthemorningafter (cute, huh?), presents a ruggedly handsome guy with a…
It’s a hot August night, and although Neil Diamond is nowhere to be found, the cast of MTV’s Real World is, in full color and surround sound in Chris Corak’s south Tempe home. Three quarters of Valley indie pop combo Reubens Accomplice — guitarists/vocalists Corak and Jeff Bufano and bassist…
After a detailed analysis of available documents and studies, New Times has arrived at the startling conclusion that in contemporary music, the intersection of rock ‘n’ roll and genetic research appears to be statistically marginal. There just ain’t a lot of guitar-slinging Petri dish mavens out there. This is all…
The mock primitive factor (hereafter referred to as mock prim) in blues is very high. Mock prim is that racial/racist double bind that says the best black music is that which is made by African Americans living in the rural South, preferably in Mississippi. Mock prim values the purist element…
Whatever happened to reverb that shoots through your veins and dilates your pupils like a drug? Whatever happened to moody vocals and drooping bass lines that leave trails across your speakers? Whatever happened to the dark, dreamy pop of shoegazers like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Swervedriver? In the words…
With a sophomore album title worthy of Lee Hazelwood or John Fahey, a swooping, tenor-throated vocal style as invigorating as the late Jeff Buckley’s and songwriting/arranging smarts steeped equally in lush late ’60s/early ’70s grandeur and contemporary post-rock/avant-folk, Brooklyn’s Chris Lee could be a poster boy for today’s increasingly crowded…
Like a lot of great compilation albums, the first volume of The Funky Precedent got to have it both ways — celebrating the past while dropping hints about the future. To hear the assembled Angelenos of Vol. 1 tell it, the destiny of hip-hop was a fusion of old-school funk…
In one of those ironies with which popular culture brims, Marilyn Manson was tarred with the stain of the Columbine shootings even though the perpetrators of that crime had no interest in his music, while Rammstein, whose noise the killers reportedly admired, largely escaped public scrutiny. The main reason, in…
These are heady days for Bob Dylan. It seems that everywhere the legendary song-poet turns these days, he’s being showered with a new round of industry honors and gushing career overviews. In the last four years, he’s received his first-ever Best Album Grammy Award (Time Out of Mind), his first…
Chicago is a city known for neighborhoods with unique little names that distinguish one from the next; among them can be found the artist/hipster/Hispanic mishmash of Wicker Park and the ethnic, working-class potpourri of Lincoln Square. There’s also Uptown, a cultural blend as overrun with students from nearby Loyola University…
It’s a steamy February night in Boynton Beach, Florida, and Chris Carraba is exhausted.Carraba, the one-man, acoustic emo-rock army professionally known as Dashboard Confessional, has just completed The Things You Have Come to Fear the Most, his second album in nine months. He’s also weathered a firestorm of controversy over…
First time I saw the Go-Go’s: early 1980s, at a local punk-rock club. Belinda Carlisle, girl of my teen-cream dreams, was chubby back then — soft and round and pretty. A girl flirting with being a woman, the angles in her face still obscured by baby fat. She couldn’t sing,…
Since it first started out in 1993, Quasi has made a career out of wedding catchy, up-tempo pop music to some of the gloomiest lyrics around. Its new album, The Sword of God — and first for the Touch & Go label — is no exception. Songwriter/keyboardist Sam Coomes and…
Not only does this CD feature the hit song “Sugar,” but it’s endorsed by Radio Disney, and the Disney Channel. Plus there’s a free AT&T Calling Card inside! It’s good for five minutes — billed in one-minute increments. There’s a surcharge for calls made from pay phones, but you can…
It probably never comes up in Tom Brokaw’s franchise, but the men who whipped the Depression at home and fascism abroad and gave us the baby boom, the Cold War and the trillion-dollar military-industrial complex also nurtured a pretty robust appetite for lurid sexuality. Witness the innuendo that seeps through…
Sometimes talking a good game will get you out of trouble. Sometimes it’ll get you famous. Sometimes it’ll get you dead. Ferdinand Morton (1891-1941), known to musical history as “Jelly Roll,” was, to judge by jazz buff Phil Pastras’ intriguing bit of cultural archaeology, one of the world’s great talkers…
Once upon a time, when Jane’s Addiction reigned as one of rock music’s most potent forces, Perry Farrell seemed the most deserving heir apparent to the crown of the Lizard King. But after the meltdown of two counterculture festivals and Porno for Pyros, those days seem very far off indeed,…
You will, no doubt, think you know where this is going: Three guys, dressed in black, maybe a little eyeliner on just for effect, definitely some secondhand suits, hitting creepy chords on some old piano, peeling off a fuzzy guitar solo, the singer mewling like a sexed-up absinthe fan. Simple,…
