As one of the 17 people who loved Sinéad O’Connor’s Am I Not Your Girl?, the Irish oddball’s much-reviled 1992 collection of big-band interpretations, I can’t in good faith begrudge teen-pop moppet Mandy Moore the opportunity to confound whatever expectations people have of Mandy Moore by releasing Coverage, a new…
As 1999’s melancholy suicide note “Adam’s Song” revealed, the boys in Blink-182 have always been more than just pop-punk pranksters delighting in fart jokes, masturbation puns and Peter Pan syndrome. The Southern California trio stresses this often during Blink-182, a drastic departure from previous albums that elevates the band beyond…
Imagine a world where rap-rock never existed. Don’t let the joy overwhelm you, but try to return to the mid-’90s, when kids began to donate their flannel shirts in droves, and bands such as Rage Against the Machine and Korn had barely gained a foothold in American pop culture. Now,…
L.A. power-popsters Phantom Planet and Australian guitar-strummer Ben Lee both know the value of friends in glitzy places: Until recently, PP counted as its drummer actor (and Coppola kin) Jason Schwartzman, hero to brainy misfits everywhere for his portrayal of Rushmore’s Max Fischer and most assuredly the reason the band…
There’s no reason you should like Leona Naess. After all, taken merely as the sum of her musical influences, Diana Ross’ former stepdaughter seems like a Frankenstein monster stitched together from parts of the Lilith Fair undead: Edie Brickell in the vocal phrasing, earthy-but-ethereal à la solo-era Natalie Merchant, a…
Texan rabble-rouser Charlie Robison’s hell-raising has been outshined lately by that of his freedom-fighting wife, Dixie Chick Emily Erwin; pissing off George W., though not hard, isn’t easy to follow. Still, Robison’s boisterous recent live album, Live, is not without its rough edges: In his brother Bruce’s “You’re Not the…
People call Duran Duran many things–decadent pretty boys, ridiculous new romantics, washed-up has-beens–but often overlooked is how their sense of savvy always superseded their savoir faire. The fab five rejuvenated disco’s slick beats with sleek Roxy Music- and Bowie-modeled art funk that made sophisticated rock palatable to teenyboppers. They also…
Blue Man Group is the goof heard ’round the world. From such simple elements as whimsy, gobs of blue greasepaint and a cobbled-together assortment of drums and PVC pipe instruments has been launched a modern entertainment and marketing juggernaut of proportions as stunning as the dazzling shows they present. These…
Jeremy Enigk is much shorter than he sounds. On the string of records he made as the leader of the mythmaking (and now defunct) Seattle outfit Sunny Day Real Estate, the singer-guitarist used his distinctive singing voice–a high, reedy croon that can swivel from angelic to tortured on a single…
Mark Pearlman is either in a bad mood or caught in the throws of an identity crisis. He gets irked when he’s referred to as “Midwestern,” even though his Minneapolis home is planted firmly in the middle of the Midwest. He gets irritated when his band, the Jayhawks, is classified…
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a female-fronted three-piece from (where else?) Brooklyn, are being hyped as the latest saviors of raw fucking rock and roll, especially in Tony Blair’s kingdom, where mania over the garage-rock phenom runs high. They come to us as yet another American garage-rock tsunami in the wake of…
What I like about you, Harry Connick Jr.: Your soundtrack for When Harry Met Sally proves how ahead of the times you were in 1989; since then, lots of folks have adopted your do-a-bunch-of-songs-for-a-movie idea, including Badly Drawn Boy and Will Oldham, but not Simon and Garfunkel, who did it…
While young San Francisco married duo Mates of State’s second full-length, 2001’s Our Constant Concern (Polyvinyl), couldn’t accurately be called “dark,” their latest, September’s Team Boo, manages such a sunny smile it’s difficult to remember when the couple sounded distressed, even tense. How is it possible that a band so…
“Tiny Town,” from native Texan Tracy Byrd’s recent The Truth About Men, is the third-best tiny-town tune I’ve heard this year, behind “Nowhere,” the Bubba Sparxxx/Kiley Dean duet from Bubba’s Deliverance, and “Shh,” the unlisted closer from Atmosphere’s Seven’s Travels, in which MC Slug big-ups his home of Minneapolis, which…
Scruffy Manchurian Damon Gough, a.k.a. Badly Drawn Boy, is as lovable as he is erratic. His debut, The Hour of the Bewilderbeast, won him the British Mercury Prize (like a Grammy, but cool) and launched him stateside; its scattered, sometimes-orchestrated disco-funk-folk was like Cat Stevens singing on a Beck record,…
When a label signs one Dallas-area band, you can almost count on said label signing another one. It may take a few months, maybe a year, but it will happen. Oh, it will happen. For example: Wind-up: The House That Creed Built kicked off its love affair with Dallas by…
The five young men in the band had to deal with more bullshit than a cattle drive, but they never seemed to mind. All they cared about was the music, so if everyone wanted to talk about their clothes or their lifestyle, screw ’em, whatever. Let them have their fun…
What with presidential primary season almost upon us, and what promises (one hopes) to be a nail-biting, nasty, brutish and long race for the White House right around the corner, you may be starting to feel a little itch in your votin’ finger. But, alas, unless you maintain primary residence…
Many bands coveted Deftones’ support slot on this year’s Summer Sanitarium Tour, opening for Metallica, Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit. If singer Chino Moreno had his way, one of those other groups would have taken it. Deftones hesitantly took their spot on the bill, only after a 3-to-2 vote that…
So I’m slumming around the downtown Manhattan branch of Tower Records the other day, and I overhear this heated conversation happening the next aisle over. The super-hipster record-store clerk is shaking his head in disbelief as a schlumpy guy in his early 30s demands–demands–to know why he can’t find any…
Sheryl Crow left Las Vegas, but have the ’90s given us a better recidivist than her? The singer’s new, surprisingly great Greatest Hits is a virtual treatise on shining up shit–on turning the shallow and tawdry and questionably legal into little three-minute packets of abandon I’d pump my quarters into…
Like many bloated genres in these times, the singer-songwriter thing could use a good pruning, if not a merciless cull. After all, how many of these–from John Mayer to Kathleen Edwards to Frat Green–either aren’t genuine singers or can’t compose anything new or fresh or even maybe just inspired and…
