Tim McGraw’s Saturday-night concert at Smirnoff Music Centre felt more like a circus act than a country show. Besides the midget in an orange furry hat, the 6-foot-5 black rapping cowboy and what appeared to be a country mosh pit forming down front, there was also “Big” Kenny Alphin of…
At long last, after you’ve burned and booted CD-R transfers of scratchy-hissy vinyl copies kept on shelves long after the record player was put into cold storage, this essential twofer makes its digital debut. It doesn’t matter how much you love that Franz Ferdinand hit single, which you still can’t…
After you get a load of the Dicks With Attitude Tour–or Ozzfest, as it’s also known–head to the Gypsy Tea Room on Wednesday night for a counteracting dose of these ladies’ respective mojos. Liz Phair didn’t quite muster the high-gloss sheen of her self-titled disc on tour earlier this year,…
The Court and Spark has long been shoehorned into the alt-country pigeonhole, but the band tweaks that equation by submerging its songs in icy washes of atmosphere. As waves of pedal steel, banjo, brass and mandolin wax and wane, guitars bob through the ether on upsurges of echo and reverb…
After nearly 13 years of almost nonstop rocking and touring, Clutch has yet to repeat itself. The Maryland-based outfit continues to put out creative, unpredictable music pulling from influences such as Led Zeppelin, the Who, John Coltrane and Chuck D. From the aggro-hop of Transnational Speedway League to the spacey,…
These Canadian alt-country vets put into practice one of that scene’s most worthwhile suppositions: that there’s fertile creative territory to be tilled by mating vintage country’s twang with more modern sounds. In the Junkies’ case, it’s the slurred, appropriately druggy atmospherics of the Velvet Underground; the cover of “Sweet Jane”…
The Velvet Teen practices in a shack. The shack, which sits in the shade of a large, leafy tree, is made of long white planks covered in fuzzy, sea-green moss. Located a couple of dozen feet off the highway, next to the home of bassist Joshua Staples’ parents in Petaluma,…
I live the High Fidelity life–donning Cons and working in an independent record store–and I can tell you that Nick Hornby’s book (and the film it inspired) sums up the music-clerk world with painful accuracy. We are geeks. We collect, covet, champion and condemn music. Even worse, we do so…
Lower Greenville isn’t exactly the classiest stretch of road in the city. All those skanky neon signs and dark alleyways, the clubs that reek of back-room drug deals. There are a few bright spots, like the Cavern, with its chatty bartenders and cozy upstairs lounge, but Taco Cabana probably calls…
Christmas morning, 1978: My brother rips open his final present to find exactly what he wanted–a newfangled chemistry set. Later, bathroom pipes will mysteriously explode. July 29, Gypsy Tea Room: Dallas band The Chemistry Set holds a CD release for its self-titled album, a lovely little CD of catchy, ethereal…
This summer do your part to reverse the tide of American cultural imperialism: Buy this young Welsh screamo band’s full-length debut and blast it the next time you feel like allowing Linkin Park to soothe the pain caused by your mom’s not getting the breakfast cereal you really wanted. The…
“Everybody, it don’t matter where you come from…we’re all just a bunch of longhaired, tattooed, hippie freaks,” Matt Hilyer boasts early in Eleven Hundred Springs’ latest album, but the attempt to unite all of the world’s downtrodden into a white trash stereotype makes Bandwagon’s dedication to straightforward, old-fashioned country all…
Sometimes in order to move forward, you have to step back. Shying away from the cracked, free-form jams of their previous album, 2002’s Phrenology, the Roots return to the more traditional boom-bap-cum-Native Tongues aesthetic of their previous work on The Tipping Point, especially on tracks such as “Stay Cool” and…
Though I was late to Double Wide on Thursday night, I caught enough of Dallas band Heaven Is a Hotel to appreciate its discordant, Fugazi-appreciative rock. Bassist Gavan Nelson carried the trio’s musical load by playing more notes than the bassists from Ned’s Atomic Dustbin combined, but he displayed enough…
History may have a bad memory, but not Ian McLagan. In the last five years, the former Faces keybs man has compiled one standard-ish best-of (Good Boys…When They’re Asleep, for Rhino), penned his randy-dandy autobio (All the Rage, without a drop of it) and, finally, mashed together the damned-near best…
If you like Pleasant Grove, then you’ll love Milton Mapes and Magnolia Summer! Lord help me if some marketing company actually steals that line for a press quote, but cheesiness aside, it’s an accurate recommendation that you can take advantage of at Barley House. Austin’s Milton Mapes smothers a plate…
I have this theory that the reason so many foreign films capture the hearts of Americans who profess to hate “pap” like Stepmom is because foreign filmmakers don’t share their American counterparts’ fear of straight-up sentiment, so their films hedge far fewer bets and therefore connect more viscerally with viewers…
The music biz demands a lot from its ranks: Confuse fish with chicken for laughs! Put your hair in cornrows even though you’re a puffy white man! Adapt to changing styles and trends so 14-year-old girls with $4 allowances will legally download your album over three weeks! I’m not sure…
Bobgoblin was a concept band: four guys in dark flight suits assigned numbers and pseudonyms, calling themselves the “leaders of Black Market Party revolution rock” and singing about “Standing Up (To the Voice of America).” The shtick that this was not just a musical band but also a band of…
Juana Molina is an Argentinean singer/guitarist who also happens to be a well-known comic actor in her native country. When she plays live she allows her long brown hair to hang in her face while she picks simple figures on her guitar and overlays them with precise vocal lines; her…
Of all the “The” bands swearing devotion to the Sonics/Stones/Stooges holy trinity of garage rock, the Hives have always seemed to have the most fun. Unhindered by the Strokes’ penchant for rock-star cliché or the White Stripes’ Machiavellian creepiness, the Hives reveled in the simple pleasures of three chords, a…
If Alejandro Escovedo’s life has been an open book, then his music has provided the soundtrack–chapters of which recount his father’s moving north from Mexico and his ex-wife’s suicide in 1991 and his divorce from his second wife in 2001 and his being diagnosed with Hepatitis C last year. You…
