Buried beneath the found sounds and homemade instruments of the intriguing debut from London five piece Flotation Toy Warning are songs of quiet but epic remorse. Frontman Donald Drusky has one hell of a wail–a yearning, nearly operatic tone, not far removed from Roy Orbison–and behind him, FTW’s engineers and…
“Being Joan Crawford at 21 was easy,” sings John Vanderslice on “Letter to the East Coast,” one of many tantalizing obscurities collected on his fifth solo CD, Pixel Revolt. Once a member of the experimental pop collective MK Ultra, Vanderslice has been honing his song craft for nearly a decade,…
For all the accolades The New Pornographers have received for their supergroup cast, the Northwestern indie champions never made an album designed for a complete sit-down listen. Their encyclopedic grasp on the past three decades of power-pop resulted in some of the best singles of the aughts, but it also…
Supergrass no longer sounds like a hyperactive younger brother jumping up and down, clamoring for attention. After releasing last year’s retrospective, Supergrass is 10, perhaps the band decided that year 11–and the album that goes with it, Road to Rouen–marked the time to grow up and mellow out. With help…
It can’t be easy for the Swinging Steaks to make a living as a country band in a rock ‘n’ roll college town like Boston. Peers are few and far between, and easy audiences must be even fewer. “Time Stands Still” acknowledges the fact with its hyperbolic opening, “Around here…
Ever since Doug Sahm passed away in 1999, there’s been a Sahm-sized hole deep in the heart of Texas. Sir Doug was the consummate Texas musician, equally adept at country, blues, rock, conjunto and Western swing–combining all these genres into an innovative brand of music that sounded like nothing but…
If you thought there were a lot of wiry, tattooed freaks hanging around the Granada before last March’s Steve Vai show, then you ain’t seen nothing. The American Metal Blast tour has the market cornered on sleazy, L.A. street-level ’80s cock rock, where the voices aren’t too shrill and the…
Man Factory didn’t want me to hear their demo. That’s what the Arlington band told their good friend Eric Michener, known better as Denton’s Fishboy, when they handed him a CD-R of their four-track experiments, and fortunately, he broke his promise and burnt me a copy. Indeed, the recklessness of…
Llano Avenue, written and performed by Dallas resident Darryl Lee Rush, is the least hip country effort you are likely to stumble across this year. Starkly produced and raggedly played songs like “Truale” and “Miles to Memphis” mix humor and misfortune with nods to roots mavericks Terry Allen and Billy…
Anton Newcombe is not a movie. I know he’s not, because I’ve seen him. His band, Brian Jonestown Massacre, had just played a gig near my New York apartment, and there he was around 1 a.m., sometime in early 2002, standing on the corner of Ludlow and Houston. Doing nothing…
Until recently, neo-soul crooner John Legend was known as John Stephens, his given moniker. Legend says he made the switch to draw more attention to his work and to challenge him with “a higher standard to live up to.” It seems to have worked. In addition to seeing Get Lifted,…
With the number of great female-fronted bands in the DFW area, you’d think door guys at local music clubs would get a clue. But when Taylor Reed, lead singer and guitarist of Denton’s Cordelane, played a Deep Ellum concert only a few weeks ago, she was reminded that the struggle…
Glove to get drunk: Four years ago, the Dallas Observer took a feature-length look at the trials and tribulations that befell Rubber Gloves before it finally opened in October 2000. A series of disagreements with city officials, building inspectors and zoning boards threatened to keep the Denton music club from…
“Bro Hymn,” from Pennywise’s self-titled, full-length 1992 debut, ranks among the most singular songs in punk history. None of the group’s peers could pull off such a staggeringly earnest ode to friendship. Bad Religion is too brainy, Green Day too wimpy and Rancid too proudly purist. Like most powerful schmaltz,…
Elliott Smith may be dead, but his spirit and voice haunt every track on Pajo. David Pajo, the former Slint member who has previously recorded as Papa M and Aerial M, uses his own name this time, and with such personal songs, the return to his real name is quite…
Three Brazilians record Latin hip-hop in Amsterdam with legendary Jamaican producer Lee “Scratch” Perry, and the results are released on a San Francisco label. As if to throw the globe-mashing in listeners’ faces, the phrase “Everything is closer than you think” is printed on the CD jacket. Zuco 103 are…
One of the best pound-for-pound live rock n roll bands today has committed a cardinal sin: Kinski have gone and played too much rock. The Seattle quartet managed to please pretty much everybody with their 2003 Sub Pop bow, Airs Above Your Station, which fused their proclivity for minimalist psychedelia…
In the very last line of the very last page of Beautiful Noise’s liner notes, Salim Nourallah issues a thank-you to “the neurosurgeons at Children’s Medical Center Dallas.” Really, this tucked-away detail is where the album starts. Nourallah has openly stated that his sophomore solo album was inspired in part…
Robbie Fulks has made a career out of pissing people off in creative ways. After building a cult following with two mid-’90s platters of hardcore ’50s honky-tonk, Fulks took an ambitious twang-pop turn on Let’s Kill Saturday Night and 2001’s Couples in Trouble, confusing some fans but never abandoning the…
Like a lot of teenage girls in the ’90s, I spent years pining for Bush lead singer Gavin Rossdale, inscribing the words to “Comedown” on my zip-up Mead binder and dutifully chugging out the chords to “Machinehead” on my guitar. But my adolescence, like Bush, is over, so how excited…
Guest-singing on “Peoria Lunch Box Blues” from Songs:Ohia’s 2003 release Magnolia Electric Co. , Scout Niblett sounded like a ghost singing from beyond the grave. Like her contemporary Cat Power, Niblett’s voice shines brightest when her accompaniment is spare and barren. Her songs usually consist of only her voice and…
Some bands are must-sees when they come through town for the sheer fact that they tour so rarely. Two Cow Garage isn’t that band–if you miss their broken-down-van cow-punk this time, chances are you’ll see ’em again as soon as November. Hell, the Columbus, Ohio trio is on the road…
