“Can we talk about something else?” It’s hard to tell whether Beulah front man Miles Kurosky is joking. After all, he’s only one question into an interview about, among other things, his band’s new album, Yoko, which he’s already confessed is his favorite of the four Beulah has released. Under…
Jack White sure does love Holly Golightly. But for most White Stripes fans, the song “Well It’s True That We Love One Another” was the first anyone had heard of her. Who was this tart little miss lobbing rose-scented rejoinders at Jack on the closing track of Elephant? Seriously. White…
Beatles parallels are a record reviewer’s best friend and worst habit. But it’s just too tempting when listening to the fascinating sprawl of OutKast’s double-length latest to consider it urban music’s heir to The White Album–and not merely because the Georgia duo of Big Boi and Andre 3000, who each…
Even those sweater-wearing, ballad-loving, lower-lip-quivering pretty boys in Travis know it to be true: “All I want to do is rock,” front man Fran Healy sang in an early single that didn’t really. Yet on new albums by hairy American Andrew W.K. and hairy Brits the Darkness–confirmed rockers with sweat…
Against the Whitneys and Britneys, the Brandys and Beyoncés, the Mariahs and Monicas, the Myas and Ashantis, Mary J. Blige is a champion, even if she’s not always recognized as such. While she has the pipes and the aura of a pop diva, Mary actually shares some of the deep…
There’s so much wrong with pop-soul slicksters Maroon 5’s Songs About Jane–which, after an inconspicuous release in June 2002, has been picking up steam recently among fans of John Mayer and Michelle Branch, both of whom have soundbitten the L.A. band–that it actually ends up kind of right. For starters,…
Usually when a thirtysomething Midwestern white guy comes face to face with his midlife crisis, it involves buying a little red Mazda and banging a secretary. That was hardly the path for Alan Sparhawk, a man who spent the better part of the past decade achieving near-icon status fronting the…
We might just be playing devil’s advocate, but for Blender magazine to name Insane Clown Posse the “worst band ever” kind of seems like a misfire. Of course, the music of Violent Jay and Shaggy 2 Dope is utterly useless, banal garbage. Of course, their ravenously adoring “Juggalo” fans are…
As much as we would like it to be, the North Texas New Music Festival will never be South by Southwest. But that’s OK, because its lower profile allows attendees to focus on what’s really important: the bands. Not free drinks or rumored special guests or industry shop talk or…
It’s a simple philosophy, one that Kenna Zemedkun offers up with little prompting. “It doesn’t matter what size the stage is. I give everything I’ve got. At the end of the day, you’ll either get it or you won’t. And the people that don’t get it, they weren’t supposed to…
“If anyone can come up with a name…” sputters Turbonegro bassist-mastermind Happy Tom, attempting–via cell phone from an Oslo taxicab, no less–to hang a handle on the Norwegian death-punk band’s upcoming excursion to the U.S. Bible Belt. Perhaps he’s trying to top last summer’s Res-Erection festival tour. “The Sex Pistols…
If you are one of the 75,000-plus people who bought Neutral Milk Hotel’s last album, the first thing you will think when you hear the Decemberists is this: Damn, that guy sings like Jeff Mangum from Neutral Milk Hotel. If you are like me, you will likely continue thinking that,…
Born of Bisquick, lumpy Georgia MC Bubba Sparxxx turned grits and good ol’ boys into a gold-selling gimmick on his 2001 debut, Dark Day, Bright Nights. But aside from wrasslin’ pigs in his videos and treating Skoal as a sacrament, Sparxxx’s actual music contained few touchstones to the Southern heritage…
The title of Black Box Recorder’s 1998 debut was England Made Me, and perhaps never before or since has an album title served so utterly and functionally to describe a band’s obsessions. Having lived in London for two years, during a period bracketed by the death of Di on one…
In showbiz, one measure of success is quitting–or at least threatening it. Sinatra did, and so did Dylan and Bowie. Even Celine Dion walked away for a while–if not for nearly long enough. So now hip-hop pit bull DMX, who’s every bit as melodramatic as the aforementioned entertainers, has made…
Nice as it is, there’s something a bit underwhelming about Baby I’m Bored, former Lemonhead Evan Dando’s long-awaited return to record-making (from wherever he was). Its lazily strummed folk-pop tunes–written and recorded with a diverse cast of indie types including Calexico, Consonant guitarist Chris Brokaw, Jon Brion, Spacehog singer Royston…
If I could get a look at the pages of Kind of Like Spitting dude Ben Barnett’s diary–the ones not detailed in his songs, I mean–I wouldn’t be surprised to find a handful of schemes to take down Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst: Though Oberst, in all fairness, has been making…
Say what you will about the ephemerality of costumes or stage names or the combination of a bald head and a really pointy goatee, but nothing illustrates the snooze potential of stoner rock (or stoner metal or psych rock or drug rock or heavy metal or desert rock) like a…
Everybody loves the Shins. No, seriously–everybody. Take Kevin, for example. All rippling, tattooed arms, head-banger hair and hell-bent-for-leather, don’t-fuck-with-me attitude, Kevin is the backstage bouncer at the Bowery Ballroom and thus something of a New York City indie-rock landmark. And generally speaking, he doesn’t like anyone, unless that someone is…
Super Furry Animals’ 2002 album, Rings Around the World, was very loosely a concept album about telecommunication. Or, more specifically, the vagaries of telecommunication–how, in a world filled with the low-grade buzz of infinite, free-floating conversations, enabled by a chain of fiber-optic links that no one save a few specialist…
From a distance, one could make a pretty solid case that the Dandy Warhols are less a band than they are authors of a chronological history of modern rock. Their first album, 1995’s Dandy’s Rule OK?, explored the 1960s drug rock pioneered by the Velvet Underground; they even titled a…
Jason Lytle has spent the past decade fronting Grandaddy, Modesto, California’s top-grossing indie-rock band. Before that he was a professional skateboarder. When you call up Lytle at his house in Modesto, this is hard to believe, since the proliferation of Jackass chic in recent years (and the persistence of my…
