I’m not one to bow my head at the altar of false guitar-god idols. Actually, I’m not one to bow my head at the altar of true guitar-god idols. Hot-shit solos and technical know-how don’t do much for me unless they’re attached to a song or an emotion or a…
In the spirit of the new year, I have gotten completely wasted on champagne to preview the Club Clearview New Year’s Eve concert, and whoa, dude, I love everybody! This concert is gonna be so cool and so many people will be there and I love the rock ‘n’ roll…
By now you’ve probably heard the song. In a bar, perhaps, or while browsing in a CD store. Maybe you heard it on the radio, as I did. One day last week the song played on my way to work and on my way home. Early the next morning I…
The Crystal Method is having a terrible time. The two guys who make up the group, Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland, sit in the shadowy corner of a posh San Francisco restaurant, surrounded by chatty radio people and low-rent journalists from video-gaming magazines. Their blond, over-tanned, birdlike manager is squabbling…
For the past few months, I’ve asked friends who know Dallas music the same questions: Can I bum a cigarette? And who are your favorite local bands? Right off, I noticed two trends–too many people smoke Marlboros, and people love Pleasant Grove. That doesn’t make Pleasant Grove the city’s most…
Talk about timing. Quite a few local bands have album releases pending for spring 2004, leaving many scenesters’ hopes for indie-rock stocking stuffers in the coal pit. But where Chomsky, Pleasant Grove and The Polyphonic Spree have placed their fans in Christmas limbo, [DARYL] has flown in like a sweaty,…
Never met a tribute album worthy of its appellation. They’re doomed, if not outright damned, endeavors that make you wonder whether the artists involved ever listened to, learned from and/or felt the musicians to whom they’re paying homage. The Clash has already been subjected to such an insult–Burning London, it…
Mac Rebennack, a.k.a. Dr. John, is America’s answer to Vladimir Horowitz. He is the foremost master of boogie-woogie and barrelhouse piano, as well as having invented a large piano vocabulary all his own, including elegant turnarounds on R&B numbers and ticklish right-hand runs on the upper keys. More significant, Dr…
Every once in a while, when I’m preaching the gospel of Dallas music to out-of-towners, some faraway friend asks about the band Doosu. That’s odd for a few reasons, but the biggest one is that this outside-Dallas Doosu chat is more common than inside-Dallas Doosu chat. At least that was…
Between you and me, I’m beginning to tire ever so slightly of The Polyphonic Spree. Some days I get into my silver VW Bug, pump up the jams on my 40-gigabyte iPod and realize that the magic just isn’t what it used to be–the novelty of fitting 86 people on…
It’s Saturday afternoon at the Dallas Music Festival, and the Gypsy Tea Room is packed. Five hundred guys–and they are almost all guys–crowd the hall. They’re not here for a performance but for an industry panel, titled (badly, like most panels) “Growing Your Band at the Club Level.” They have…
Lyle Lovett is a Zen master of cool and calm, no doubt about it. But on this particular occasion he is just a wee bit ruffled. An article in The New York Times recounting a motorbike ride he took with a reporter through the Hill Country got botched in the…
For the average person, “spoken word” is not a good thing. It evokes images of people with mikes, flannel shirts, strident voices and issues with their parents (or parent-substitute, the government). No thanks. Spoken word was pitched as a trend, hyped as poetry-meets-rock-and-roll. Suddenly, every coffeehouse had an open-mike night,…
It’s not often we ask a band, “Where did the emo go?” We wouldn’t bid tearful farewells if a band filled with Caucasian, well-to-do musicians gave up on sappy, pseudo-punk tunes, whether they’re whiny like Dashboard Confessional or tolerably upset like Pedro the Lion. So what’s our beef with Slowride?…
Gone but not totally forgotten, though three of its former members have done their damnedest to erase all record of rage or even minor irritability. No one sounded like Rage Against the Machine before (save, maybe, Public Enemy and the MC5), and no one has since–especially Audioslave, which calms like…
This South London collective of delightfully cracked and activist musos and DJs serve up wickedly ingenious music that smashes genres with every pummeling drum beat. Then they slather the crust of their sinfully delicious concoctions with canny commentary and observations, keen literary allusions and a firm grip on musical history…
Richard “Kinky” “Big Dick” Friedman’s running for governor of the great state o’ Texas, and what else is new? Seventeen years back he ran for justice of the peace in Kerrville and almost won; might have, if only people would have voted for him. So now he throws his Stetson,…
Sixty-two-year-old Ronald Isley is nearing the end of an unexpectedly busy year: a handsome reissue of the Isley Brothers’ 1973 LP 3+3; Body Kiss, a slyly persuasive new Isleys disc featuring Ronald and guitarist Ernie (and songwriting from R. Kelly); and a brand-new collaborative CD from Isley and composer/arranger/producer Burt…
Drinking coffee with Jason Pierce of Spiritualized one morning earlier this year (actually, I drank coffee; he drank Rolling Rock), I asked him why Amazing Grace, his band’s latest album, sounds so much rawer and more off-the-cuff than the couple that preceded it. He took a swig (actually, two) and…
They are a young band. They have a Web site and a mailing list and a few starry-eyed fantasies, like the one in which the A&R guy comes to their best gig, stands in the back, with a low-slung hat maybe, smoke curling from his silhouette. You know: the discovery…
The whole point of rock and roll, as Placebo front man Brian Molko sees it, is never growing up. That’s what everyone who straps on a guitar or picks up a microphone is after. It’s certainly not a new theory. Pete Townshend even wrote a song about it. Actually, Pete…
A year and a half ago, this EP wasn’t possible. Tweed was ambitious, sure, but something was amiss and obviously so. Their songs, falling unencumbered into that wide world of Americana, were simple and fun, but Tweed was just another good bar band, known around these parts for their completely…
