On contemporary maps, Teoc, Mississippi, rests as far off the path as it did in the twilight years of the 19th century. Located almost exactly between Texarkana, Arkansas, and Birmingham, Alabama, Teoc lies several miles from the nearest U.S. Route. And there wasn’t a single paved road anywhere near it…
On a wickedly humid afternoon in late June, singer/songwriter Billy Sedlmayr sits in the sunken room of his barrio bungalow, cursing to the heavens. He’s battling demons and not faring too well. The bestial horrors lurking in the narrow margins between shadow and darkness move too quickly for him, and…
My Morning Jacket is sort of like a Louisville Ween: Playful but heartfelt, artsy but unpretentious, and capable of shelving bizarro freak-tunes alongside evocative and nostalgic songs. It’s a toss-up as to how 22-year-old Jim James, the Neil Young-channeling singer and songwriter for MMJ, would take to that comparison, but…
As it turns out, Tricky’s been making records even he hates — contract-killers, he might call them, if not audience-killers in the process. (Everything since 1995’s Maxinquaye has been one “fuck-off” record after another, he explains, as in: “Fuck off, I’m not giving people what they want,” he offers in…
“Oh, man, don’t ask me. I don’t know where the fuck we’re headed next. We had plans to go off someplace else on the next part of the actual tour, but our cuckoo label decided to send us out to play for some distributors’ thing . . . in Washington?…
Mark Eitzel sits at a long table in a conference room, his trademark short-brimmed hat in front of him. He’s taking part in a panel on new technology issues at the CMJ Change Music Festival with a number of other artists, including Creeper Lagoon’s Sharky Laguana, the Mountain Goats’ John…
Given rock’s smutty half-century, it’s a wonder that The Mammoth Book of Sex, Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll (Carroll and Graf), edited by Jim Driver, is only 600 pages long. Fortunately, the British collection passes on the well-known shock fodder by stateside writers and shovels up a pile of lesser-known…
Memorial Day, 2001. Hung over. Dive-bombers unload on the insides of your skull. You are sitting on your couch appreciating little, and doing less. It is not yet noon and already a thin layer of sweat covers your body. Your face stings of bursting blood vessels. The agonizing knob on…
In the lengthy liner notes that introduce the new three-disc collection Thelonious Monk: The Columbia Years, jazz pundit Peter Keepnews is oddly apologetic about the music included in the anthology, at one point confessing that, among his fellow critics, “the notion has taken hold that, all things considered, maybe this…
Best band ever, if only for turning “. . . Baby One More Time” into the most poignant ballad of 2000; best band ever, if only for making “Killer Queen” live up to its billing. Yes, Travis is the world’s most astute and least finicky cover band — it renders…
The packaging for the rerelease of this 1982 West Berlin concert is designed to distract you from the fact that the show was staged in support of Trans, the album where Neil Young’s obsession for Devo spilled into Kraftwerk and Klaus Naomi territory. But the After the Gold Rush-era portrait…
When Billy Joe Shaver gives directions to his modest house on the outskirts of Waco, Texas, he says to disregard the handwritten sign on his front door. “Please do not disturb I haven’t slept in two days,” it says. “That’s just so some ol’ drunks don’t come by at 5…
It’s a late Friday night at Modified, the tiny art/performance space on Roosevelt Street in downtown Phoenix, and everything is going to hell. Youthful noisemakers Thee Apologies, who come on like a bunch of hyperactive teenagers playing in the basement while their parents are on vacation, are forgetting words and…
Meet Paque, Daisy and Stella, a trio of trend-trawling, Bananarama-obsessed Gen Y’ers from the Phoenix ‘burbs whose lives are dedicated to the quest for fame and celebrity. Never mind that these girls possess zero talent or the aptitude to develop same, they have that need to “make it.” They simply…
Mogwai had barely made it to Detroit before drummer Martin Bulloch’s heart started skipping. He felt the off-rhythms in his chest that told him his pacemaker was acting up — his body even rejecting it, maybe, as he’d been warned. Nobody wanted to take any chances, so Bulloch made his…
“We are certainly not control freaks, but we do as much of it as we can do ourselves to keep our own expression, our own way,” says the tall, thin and boyishly handsome John Dufilho regarding the Deathray Davies’ fiercely independent spirit. Autonomy is actually built into the very structure…
It’s hard to imagine a more self-effacing guitar hero than Doug Martsch. The leader and driving force of Built to Spill — Boise, Idaho’s greatest claim to musical immortality — Martsch brings to mind Robert Christgau’s old line (in reference to T-Bone Burnett) about being unable to resist a humble…
Jonny Greenwood would prefer not to be here, this I know. Talking on an intercontinental phone call to yet another journalist about how great Radiohead, in which he plays guitar, is and how important Amnesiac, its new record, is in the face of the cultural poverty that’s replaced the 21st-century…
Tiffany Anders has a pedigree that most indie hopefuls would happily die for. Imagine growing up in the Hipsterville Hills of Los Angeles with respected film director Allison Anders (Gas, Food, Lodging) for a mom. A mom who’d drag you along to see bands like Redd Kross or X when…
Why do Euro-electronica acts tease us with sexy albums we can get down to, only to follow them up with moody, dark albums we can’t? Massive Attack did it with Mezzanine, the follow-up to Protection. Portishead did it with its self-titled follow-up to Dummy. Tricky, well, who knows where his…
Okay, this one’s a no-brainer. Australian Rock. What do these words bring to mind? If you say “Radio Birdman,” you need to take off your headphones and look outside. It’s 2001. Ditto “The Birthday Party.” And Nick Cave/Bad Seeds/Dirty Three haven’t lived in Australia for years, so they don’t count…
None of the musical underground’s ever-multiplying genres is so singly identified with one band as post-rock is with Tortoise. Since the mid-’90s, indie hipsters and cutting-edge types have indiscriminately applied the tag to anything vaguely improvisational, proggy and/or instrumental, but post-rock usually boils down to the experimentation of a handful…
