The Handsome Family’s Rennie Sparks has something to tell her fellow Americans. “I’m not weird!” she exclaims. “You only think I’m weird because you don’t want to admit you feel the same fucking way.” Europeans, by contrast, seem to understand the dark muse of this Chicago husband-and-wife goth-country duo a…
Punk rock is a lot of things. Loud, always. Fast, mostly. Angry, sometimes. Uplifting? Well, yeah. Actually, if it’s done well, it can be downright inspirational — firing up the engines of self-empowerment that typically lie dormant, or creating a political sounding board (whether to the left, right or center),…
A few weeks ago, Willie Nelson was the featured artist on the weekly PBS live-music show, Sessions at West 54th. Over the course of his hourlong performance, it slowly began to sink in that the petite blond vocalist to Nelson’s left was not your run-of-the-mill backup singer. It was Shelby…
Here’s where Josh Homme and the gang forget about their Stone Age evolution from Kyuss and start making the “Queen” part of the name count for something. Just like a baked version of Sheer Heart Attack, songs run together with no gaps in between, making each installment seem stranger than…
“Alternative music with a vision launches the musical trends of tomorrow” — what a noble philosophy! Once upon a time, many of us actually believed it, at least until the corporate world came in and bastardized the idea of an underground. But the folks at the staunchly independent Triple X…
In 1965-1966, it was still possible for a garage band to make the leap to Top 40 and back to obscurity all in the same year. These Sundazed reissues brilliantly capture that moment before the window of opportunity closed like an automatic garage door. With so little time to make…
On a quiet spring night several weeks ago, a radical metamorphosis took place within the normally placid confines of Tempe’s Arizona Roadhouse Brewery. The usual clientele — middle-class jeans-and-tee-shirt types — was replaced by an invasion of leather-and-metal-spike-clad, greasy haired hellions and young ladies wearing more makeup than clothing. As…
No one’s ever accused Sascha Konietzko, the man behind the now-dead KMFDM and the very much alive MDFMK, of suffering from incurable optimism. Since the ’80s, he’s made hard-as-nails electro/industrial music whose lyrics focus on topics such as inhumanity and anguish, not true love and thongs. But last year’s massacre…
My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge/that’ll stab you in the head/whether you’re a fag or lez/ . . . hate fags? The answer’s yes — Eminem, “Criminal.”Marshall Mathers LP, the sophomore effort from Michigan-by-way-of-Missouri native Eminem, ranks among the year’s best from a musical standpoint. With…
Back when Ricky Nelson sang about being a lonesome “Teenage Idol” playing one-night stands, road songs were still a novelty, something chain-smoking Brill Building songwriters cooked up in between gulps of coffee. Once rock stars began writing from their own personal experiences, hundreds of songs came down the pike lamenting…
Twenty-year-old aspiring guitar maker Allen Pegues recalls his high school days. “I was all about buyin’ me some beer,” he says. “That’s what I did.” Pegues lives near downtown in a neighborhood peopled by crack dealers, whores and kids wielding oversize bikes with bare-rimmed wheels who noisily run over empty…
Perhaps it was optimistic to think this wasn’t much of an issue anymore, but the reviews of nyc ghosts and flowers seem to fall under two general, and stupidly familiar, headers: (1) Sonic Youth is, and has been ever since ’round about 1990, coasting on soft/inferior material, of which this…
Stefan Betke of Berlin started the ~scape label after his own work (recorded under the name Pole) sold beyond anyone’s expectations, turning him into one of the few experimental electronic music producers recognized by anyone outside the insular “Intelligent Dance Music” community. After wowing critics and fellow studio maestros alike…
When in 1980 I first jammed my eight-track cartridge of Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! into the maw of my father’s massive console stereo, and he heard the boinky-squeaky sounds emerging from his speakers, he looked at me like I’d lost my natural 9-year-old mind. I…
You don’t see the “Simultaneous Two New Album Release” every day, and with good reason. 1991: Nobody can convince Axl Rose to pare down a pair of new Guns N’ Roses albums, each CD with over 75 minutes of music — the length of two White Album sets minus all…
And then Lou Reed says, “I love you.” It’s his way of answering a question that could, in truth, be interpreted as a vague compliment — something about how his albums have never conformed to fad or fashion, something about how Lou Reed albums always sound like Lou Reed albums…
Traditional Irish folk music has been combined with plenty of different musical styles, so you’d think mixing it with punk and hard-core would be some kind of joke, right? Wrong. The Dropkick Murphys, Boston’s premier Irish punk working-class band, uses bagpipes, grinding guitars and bone-shaking rhythms. Three-chord punk blasts surround…
The Tavern, as it’s called, is the only rock ‘n’ roll bar in town. It’s located down the highway, past the car dealership and the strip mall, and sits next to the one shop in town that rents out porn videos. Seasoned Oldsmobiles and Fords clutter the parking lot, and…
Tragedy has been a constant companion of the Promise Ring through the past couple of years. In early 1998, while on tour, the band’s van flipped over on an icy road and left all its members hospitalized; guitarist Jason Gnewikow spent three weeks in a hospital room with a broken…
Back in the early ’90s, music constructed out of the breakbeat branched into two distinct factions: hip-hop and drum and bass. Separated by the Atlantic from their stateside counterparts and responding to their own socioeconomic conditions, British drum and bass producers bred a different kind of animal altogether — twice…
By the fall of 1959, Marty Robbins had amassed a recorded catalogue of five albums and 32 singles. Embedded in this waxwork were songs with whistling, songs with yodeling, songs with rockabilly guitar licks and songs with Little Richard-type squeals. One song even had sped-up chipmunk vocals. There was a…
Invariably, conversations at the New Times offices drift to topics such as, does Britney Spears need a spanking, and if so, would she accept one? (Answers: Yes, and probably.) Or, those guys from ‘N SYNC and the Backstreet Boys must be gettin’ it on more than a lounge singer in…
