Music

If only Sam Phillips had said, “If I could find me a white boy who could play harp like Muddy Waters,” rock history might’ve taken a different turn. But rockabilly’s loss is blues’ gain. Charlie Musselwhite grew up in Memphis (and actually ran moonshine, according to his bio), was friends…

This Phoenix rapper’s all-caps fact sheet states that he’s got “A THREE HUNDRED SONG CATALOG WITH HEATSTROKE CREATING OVER FIFTY OF THOSE HIMSELF,” and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “OVER FIFTY” is bolded. Despite 50 Cent’s The Massacre becoming a quadruple-platinum album and charting in the Top 5…

A former break-dancing teen turned singer-songwriter from Watsonville, California? Can’t wait for the video. Not sure what brings him to the Valley from the Bay Area, but his first album has some likable acoustic rap-rock moments and a particularly angelic female background vocal that makes nearly every number a treat…

“I don’t go to singer-songwriter shows anymore because they’re boring,” Seattle alt-folkie Damien Jurado recently told Paste magazine. “I don’t care if you’re Conor Oberst or Nick Drake. Boring. Who wants to stand there? Not me.” While I respect Jurado’s opinion, he’s dead wrong, at least when it comes to…

The wonder of music is its ability to transcend cultural barriers and speak in a booming voice directly to the heart. Rory Block is white and a woman, but she’s a truly gifted “bluesman” who knew and trained with the best. The daughter of a Greenwich Village sandal maker at…

If your short memory of this group begins and ends with its alt-rock-before-it-was-alt-rock hit “Anything Anything (I’ll Give You),” you’re in good company. This Wayne, New Jersey, group relocated to California when “Anything Anything” became the most requested song in KROQ’s history after Rodney Bingenheimer gave it his endorsement (founding…

If you haven’t been to Japan or watched the Cartoon Network of late, you might be unaware of the aidorus known as Puffy AmiYumi — the female twosome that’s at least as big, if not bigger, on the streets of Tokyo than even heyday Britney or the Backstreet Boys ever…

Is there any doubt by now that whenever Neko Case opens her mouth, amazing things happen? Through a string of fantastic solo albums beginning in 1997, the flame-haired, 34-year-old Virginia native has established herself as one of the most dynamic country singer-songwriters around. Her pipes are powerful but frayed in…

Artson enters the game with a pedigree: He was a member of the legendary Rocksteady Crew, and his record boasts guest shots by Tash of Tha Alkaholiks, and Likwit Junkie Wildchild. And on a first pass, he passes muster. The production on songs like the album-opening “Who” and the quasi-Latin…

A full five years after the landmark The Unseen, producer/MC/chronic chameleon Madlib once more huffs helium and becomes the high-pitched hooligan Quasimoto. But times have changed and so has ‘Lib, because where The Unseen was a mind-warping fusion of space-age samples and hyperspeed rhyming, The Further Adventures of Lord Quas…

Like its sonic predecessors — jazz, blues and R&B — hip-hop is undergoing a massive assimilation until everything is tinged with, in one way or another, rap. The sheer amount of gimmickry in producing and presenting “original” hip-hop today is daunting, which is why a record like True & Livin’…

The original twist of ’70s glam rock — in its less artsy (and better) form — was the basic contradiction of dudes in outrageously feminine costumes playing aggressive, back-to-basics rock ‘n’ roll. To varying degrees, Slade, T. Rex, and Gary Glitter exemplified this angle of the weirdest chapter of British…

Outside the scope of rock and pop, “supergroups” are less heralded. Besides the acclaimed Masters of Persian Music, Arabic folk mergers remain sparse. Niyaz (NEE-az) easily slips into that category, drawing from a thousand years of Iranian and Indian influence and rebooting it with digital charges. Comprising former Vas vocalist…

It’s one of music’s great arguments whether great bands are the product of movements or their creators. Put another way: Had Agnostic Front formed at any other time, would it have been as important? Leader of the mid-’80s NYC hardcore movement, Agnostic Front was one of the first to deliver…

Around your bros, it’s impossible not to sneer at the mawkish sentimentality of Hopes and Fears, the debut from Brit trio Keane. But get those same guys around their girlfriends and wives, and the record takes on this weird power — it becomes . . . beautiful . . …

Rock is like a young Clark Kent still discovering his abilities: sometimes a little immature in the application. Thus rock sometimes feels the need to demonstrate its dominance, slapping its roaring guitar member on the table like a grotesque gavel. But majesty is another form of power, and delicacy can…

Denmark’s Raveonettes are not exactly soulful, but they are soulfully obsessed with pop music’s halcyon past. And unlike most other style bands, Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo sculpt their obsession into something beautiful, not merely fashionable. Pretty in Black, the boy-girl duo’s third and most original album, combines early-’60s…

It wouldn’t be quite fair to call trance kingpin Josh Wink a hippie, but hell, we will anyway, because of his vegan lifestyle and the years he wore his blond hair in long dreadlocks. But then again, hippies aren’t known for being anti-drug — for that matter, neither are trance…