If I didn’t know any better–and I don’t, actually–I’d swear Jim James is higher than Rush Limbaugh on an OxyContin binge right now. More than likely the singer-guitarist for My Morning Jacket is not, but the conversation we’ve been having is enough probable cause for a search warrant. That is,…
It’s a cloudless March day in Dallas, and with a few hours to kill before sound check, the Electric Six is doing what any red-blooded American band on tour would do in Dallas: They’re eating hot dogs on the grassy knoll. An hour spins on as the band runs around…
Labeling an artist a fluffy light-rock Muzakhead is the kiss of death for musical credibility, conjuring nightmarish visions of Air Supply and other somnolent saps. But there’s no denying that the music of Brits Dido and Travis doesn’t exactly ooze testosterone. Dido’s breezy “Thank You,” sampled by Eminem for “Stan,”…
There aren’t many artists who can go through as many stylistic changes as Elvis Costello and still maintain a sizable and loyal following. Since Costello emerged, he’s been (to name just a few) a surly, acid-tongued rocker; a sardonic but heartfelt rootsy singer-songwriter; and an elegant song stylist performing in…
Rock songs tend to fall into one of two broad categories: the emotional and the ones about emotion. But Death Cab for Cutie songwriter Ben Gibbard and his band straddle the two: On songs such as the title track of Death Cab’s new album Transatlanticism, Gibbard’s reedy tenor expresses both…
If anyone alive could bring legitimacy to the sound of your average nightclub, it’s progressive house mainstay Paul Van Dyk. Though the German producer has frequently and publicly repudiated the term, his work helped validate trance music with an accessible pop sensibility that marries ethereal, minor-key melodies with DJ-friendly tempos…
I look forward to the day when this corporate branding of rock-and-roll tours gets truly out of hand: Captain D’s Under the Sea Spectacular (featuring Primus, the Vulgar Boatmen and Phish), the Kmart Blue Light Special (Q-Tip and the Dixie Cups), Pfizer’s Don’t Stop Believing Roadshow (D12, Medicine and guest…
According to the urban laws of gentrification, artists and social misfits generally tend to bring a mixed bag of blessings when they move into the ‘hood. They add to the local color and do wondrous things to their spaces, but higher rents, baby-toting yuppies and Starbucks cafés always seem to…
As an adulthood-long vegetarian, I don’t much care for meat. But potatoes I love: boiled, broiled, roasted, baked, freedom fried, whatever. This means I’m digging about half of The Long Road, the new one by stout Canadian hard-rockers Nickelback and the follow-up to 2001’s mega-selling Silver Side Up, the home…
Kathleen Edwards is not a carbon-copy winsome angry waif, in spite of what the tunes on Failer might suggest. True, the songs on her debut are retorts to a world of pain, of sour nights, bitter mornings, hard drinking, bad love, bad music and excess. There are, however, a few…
Three years ago, Ronnie Dawson allowed the Dallas Observer to excerpt his autobiography-in-progress (“A Legend in the Making,” November 23, 2000); its working title was Who is Ronnie Dawson? On September 30, its title became, sadly, past tense, when the rockabilly pioneer forever known as the Blond Bomber succumbed to…
It’s a natural progression, really, one that makes perfect sense. Most cats who would be inclined to put together a 264-page history of how sneakers affected New York’s youth culture in the 1970s and ’80s probably would have arrived at that point by following the same path Bobbito Garcia did…
Over the years, we’ve wondered why some of the bigger rock shows don’t come to Dallas but do, on occasion, schedule a stop in Houston. Or near Houston, we should say, since the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion is in The Woodlands, a suburb about half an hour or so outside…
Calling punk an attitude has become something of an MTV-generation cliché. Usually it’s offered up as a post-mortem tribute to a musician’s rebelliousness and unvarnished risk-taking musical credibility: Johnny Cash, yo, that guy was punk. Bob Marley. Dee Dee Ramone (duh). But there’s more resonance, now, in punk as an…
Very rarely does a rock band release a “remix album,” and that’s fine by us. In most cases, producers just strip the most identifiable vocals from a song and plop them down over cookie-cutter club beats. So why bother? It makes more sense in the case of the Dismemberment Plan,…
Achtung, baby: I’m one of those soulless cranks who likes Liz Phair’s new record. A few weeks ago I argued elsewhere that the album’s four Matrix-produced songs “demonstrate how much room there is inside radio-pop sheen for actual emotional content”–particularly with regard to “the everyday compromises of single-momhood.” And I…
Erykah Badu’s latest, Worldwide Underground, is like a novella from a great writer–you’re reminded of the earlier stuff, you hear the continuation of old story lines and themes, but then you notice that it floats above a new tone; the voice rattles with a different urgency. The new record transcends…
The guys in Chicago’s Califone look at Americana from the inside out, taking stock of the form’s parts (rootsy acoustic strumming, wagon-wheel drumming, cigarette-smoke vocalizing) and seeing what’s not there (warped keyboard whine, laptop clicks, lyrics about “sugar hands” and “amputated years”). On Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, their latest, they fit all of…
“One speaker keeps going out on the stereo, but the music still sounds great,” sings Eric Hisaw on “Maybe the Devil,” the song that launches 2002’s Never Could Walk the Line with the primal musician myth of trading one’s soul to Satan for talent. Hisaw makes the reverse swap perhaps;…
It might be the deal to beat in 2003: two eccentric, slightly hair-raising singer-songwriters appearing together for the price of…well, two, I suppose, since neither is playing in the parking lot for free. Papa M should be worth the bucks, since with the recent dissolution of Zwan (in which he…
Back in the day, and we’re talking about maybe five or six years ago, the Good/Bad Art Collective could be counted on for at least one genius music moment every few months. Centro-matic’s Will Johnson performing in a bunny suit on a swing. Chomsky playing in a box. E.F.F. doing…
If Lisa Marie Presley had the last name of, say, Jones, would the Dallas Observer be speaking to the singer who put out the album To Whom It May Concern? Given the music on her now gold record, maybe, maybe not. Then again, Presley hardly needs to strive for any…
