Music

There’s an almost incomprehensible sweep in the desert landscape that awestruck newcomers often interpret with the word “majesty.” To natives, it’s often just “home,” but it seems rare that anyone besides a native can locate that desert place of mind where the routine of seeing as much of the planet…

Maybe it’s the fact that they’re on Chapel Hill’s Merge Records, maybe it’s the boy/girl vocal interplay, maybe it’s their celebrated and seemingly endless back catalogue of EPs and singles, maybe it’s their penchant for happy melodies and verbal knife-twisters like “We don’t have to pretend we’re married/But we like…

You almost hate saying that Chicago quintet Frisbie is following in the tradition of bands such as Jellyfish, the Posies, Greenberry Woods, Zumpano and the Grays — that’s like condemning them as a brilliant talent and a surefire commercial flop. Big Star drew up the power-pop template for failure two…

The first words Johnny Cash sings on American III: Solitary Man are “I won’t back down”; the last are “I am just going over Jordan/I am just going over home.” In between is a 14-song rumination on death and redemption as uplifting as it is, in places, utterly terrifying. It’s…

Tonight is a homecoming. It’s been three and a half years since Dead Hot Workshop’s classic lineup has played together, more than that since it’s taken the stage at Long Wong’s, the last remaining vestige of a scene it helped create. For a decade it was the most respected group…

“This past summer,” says Andrew Rieger, “we were in Kyoto, Japan, and there was a great crowd came out, they were really into it. And when we were done with the show, they all, all the kids, they grabbed us and made us start dancing with them. For about two…

John Wesley Hall believes justice is a myth taught in classrooms, a fable found in law books, as imaginary as the unicorn and the mermaid. The Arkansas attorney mentions case after case in which he represented an innocent who wound up imprisoned or, worse, executed; in the course of a…

This month Gumbo dips into the mailbox and answers those cosmic questions regarding jazz and blues. But first, a little press for those jazzers whose lives reached the expiration date. From the label that reissued the entire Monkees catalogue comes two remastered John Coltrane albums, Coltrane Plays the Blues and…

As a result of its de-genderizing baggy pants aesthetic and sometimes not-so-tangential connection to the drug Ecstasy, the rave movement has generally downplayed and even ignored the inherent sexuality of dance music. Techno and its often disembodied variants, though, were not able to fully subvert the shallow lustfulness inherited from…

Despite our holier-than-thou attitudes and go-down-with-our-Titanic-size predispositions, we rock critics love to eat our words. Well, as long as it’s us serving our own plates and not some yob bent on humiliation and revenge; the public pillory should be reserved for those musicians with outsized egos who really deserve it…

It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that Joan of Arc mastermind Tim Kinsellas is acutely peculiar, at least as far as his compositions are concerned. A random sampling of songs from Joan of Arc’s past three records would prove as much — from the “too smart…

Tristeza coalesced from the remains of San Diego punk bands that had burned themselves out, just as a black hole comes from a dead star. The sweet, viscous instrumental rock the band produces on Dream Signals in Full Circles, though, is as far from the piercing hard-core of the Locust…

“Kurt. Kurt. Look up, man.” With his dark eyebrows arched beneath a shock of freshly bleached hair, Chicken bassist John White is reprimanding singer Kurt Klinger, telling him to look at the camera. Klinger, quietly fiddling with the label on his beer bottle, shoots a goofy grin in the photographer’s…

Dilated Peoples rapper Rakaa (who also answers to Iriscience) describes the meaning of The Platform, the group’s debut, as “our stage,” “a soapbox” and “a street corner.” “We’re coming together and working and improvising and doing these things,” he explains. “We’re able to express ourselves individually and find a way…

“Hi, I’m John Wright. Uh . . . all these songs are copyrighted 1985, words and music by myself. Uh, conceptually, they form the songs for a, uh, rock video opera I have written in my mind. It’s set mostly in Hawaii and the Orient. It’s called Teenage Volleyballers.” When…

Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt’s book Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles’ Let It Be Disaster contains the sort of minutiae that gives a hard-on to the hard-core. The 332-page book, published last year, is less a narrative than an autopsy constructed from bootlegged outtakes made during the…

On West Peoria Avenue, a proliferation of “Going Out of Business” and “For Rent” signs dangles on drab storefronts like so many dusty postscripts to corporate will. The mom-and-pop shops that once were the lifeblood of retail sales in Phoenix are falling piecemeal, replaced by chain outlets and beasts called…

I have seen the future of pop music, and its name is Robbie Williams. . . . is I guess what we’re supposed to say after wading through this 50-minute valentine from Williams to himself, but Lordy, how it do fall flat. It might be taken as parody, I suppose,…

There are a lot of country-music geezers, alive and dead, who have carved their craggy likenesses onto hillbilly history in various ways, as men of the soil, men sporting braids or pompadours, in Nudie suits or cowboy hats. A vast 75-year parade of city slickers and kids from the sticks,…

A four-year mainstay of the North Carolina club scene but still relative newcomers nationally, Charlotte’s Lou Ford is one of those groups that charmed the critics outta their trees a couple of years ago via a low-watt but incandescent debut, Sad, But Familiar. The signature Sweetheart of the Rodeo-meets-Exile on…