Music

For the record, the members of Death Takes a Holiday don’t worship the devil, though you might be confused if you’ve only caught one of the group’s frenetic live performances. Onstage, the band rocks with a ferocity that would make Lucifer beam and bang his head. The band pumps out…

The army on the tiny Chez Nous dance floor is a microcosm of the Valley’s population, of ethnicity, age, size and gender. White, black, brown, smart, stupid, silly, happy, drunk. There are slinky strippers with moneyed suitors. There are divorcée moms going out. Cocksure gents work every angle. Snow-haired couples…

In the spring of 1962, Memphis producer Sam Phillips, ever the iconoclast, did something he hadn’t attempted in nearly a decade: He recorded a set of raw blues, the kind of stuff that boomed from the juke joints and roadhouses that dotted the flat, desolate landscape of north Mississippi. Phillips,…

Mick Taylor sighs. “I almost regret calling it that,” he says wearily of his recent album, A Stone’s Throw, due for stateside release this month. The album, in the works for most of the late ’90s, was at one time named for its lead track, “Secret Affair.” Cooler marketing heads…

Trip hoppers and drum ‘n’ bass DJs routinely give props to hip-hop for the blueprint of their samples and beats. Rarely is such credit offered mutually, even though drum ‘n’ bass’ staccato beats underpin nearly everything found in the oveures of Timbaland, Missy Elliott or the Neptunes. Which is one…

Time for a Jimi Hendrix moment. Imagine, for just a minute, that you’re shuffling around on a Manhattan sidewalk outside the Fillmore East one late December 1969 afternoon. Longhaired, pock-faced roadies have been rolling gear into the legendary venue for a couple of hours, and you notice that a pair…

After listening to Sarah Cracknell’s solo debut, four out of five dentists will surely recommend brushing. The St. Etienne vocalist’s voice is sticky sweet and fluffier than marshmallow cream — perfectly suited to the emaciated synth-pop lite of her band and Lipslide. Released in the U.K. in 1996 and reissued…

Yes, Bernard Butler was once the guitarist for Brit-pop phenomenon Suede. But he’s quick to point out that his quantity of work post-Suede is now larger than his output as a member. For Butler it’s an irritating association, like constantly being reminded of who you were in high school. He…

In Kool Keith Thornton’s world, the traditional rap skit often takes a turn toward the disturbing, but not via hoochie-mama sex scenes or gangsta violence (to which rap fans, of course, have become accustomed and inured). No, Keith’s raps involve dramatic elements such as a quiet scene in which he…

Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was easy, no, make that compulsory, to laugh at the British music scene. The American indie explosion had given rock the bitch slap of life it desperately needed while England was still determined to construct the next New Kids on the…

Over breakfast of an English muffin and Diet Coke (and in a voice much lower than his singing falsetto), Green Gartside, the man who will always be Scritti Politti, tries to explain himself. Gartside grew disillusioned after Scritti Politti found pop success in the ’80s and quickly walked away. Trying…

There are, of course, the great intro riffs: Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” Led Zep’s “Whole Lotta Love,” B.O.C.’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl,” etc. Oft copped, rarely topped. Instinctively grasping this, Fu Manchu still manages to elbow some room with a brand of high-octane, hard-pounding psychedelia that’s instantly…

This probably seemed like a good idea back in the old days, when the world gave a steaming crap about Oasis: Bros Noel and Liam Gallagher would assemble and bookend a tribute to their rave fave that isn’t spelled B-E-A-T-L-E-S, then release it a month before their own long-awaited third…

It’s got to be one of the strangest boxed sets ever released, even though it stars the Stooges, one of rock’s most celebrated (at least these days) bands. 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions is a seven-CD collection, clocking in at just under eight hours and thoroughly documenting what has…

I took out my six-string razor/ The axe is cold — Mott the Hoople A vein throbs alarmingly on either side of his neck, and his bright red face looks swollen and ready to explode. His half-open mouth exposes a weather-beaten picket fence of teeth. His pupils, set in a…

Contrary to what one might surmise from the band’s name, Tucson’s Wise Folk Malcontent doesn’t play anything even remotely resembling folk music. And don’t call them an emo band, either; never mind that the group has sported several of the defining emo traits over the course of its existence –…

It’s 6 a.m. and there’s no one in the building. The morning begins just as the night has ended, in a dark cloud of self-doubt and heartbreak. Reeking of stale smoke and even staler beer, I wind through a dim labyrinth of hallways and cubicles. Still reeling from the night’s…

Shelton Williams was just another face in another crowd, an anonymous punk with safety pins in his clothes — and, occasionally, his skin — playing in unknown bands with names like Buzzkill and worse. He was onstage from the time he was 15, yet rarely at the front, usually playing…

How can you dislike a guy whose past albums have self-deprecating titles like Poet, Fool or Bum and Lee Hazlewoodism: The Cause and Its Cure? And how can you pass up an album dedicated to “pimps, whores, pushers, dopers, gangsters and the bottom of the human chain shit-heels”? You can’t,…

The debut record from Jucifer worms its way into the coldest of cynical hearts by starting out full throttle and then coasting to a close. There is a long downward trajectory in aggression from beginning to end; by the time the record is finished, the band has referenced a handful…