“I just got done frying up some bacon and eggs,” Summer Hymns leader Zachary Gresham says with a lazy, Jimmy Carter drawl. “Now I just have to wash the pot.” Cleaning up after breakfast at 2 in the afternoon, Gresham is living the life most would-be rock stars dream about…
The problem the reformed Jane’s Addiction faces on Strays, the L.A. band’s first new studio album since 1990’s Ritual de lo Habitual, is one they predicted years ago: Nothing about it is shocking. In the band’s first conquest, rock was theirs for the taking, “alternative” an idea they helped invent…
Serart is the fascinating debut collaborative art project from the gifted Armenian multi-instrumentalist Arto Tunc Boyaciyan and System of a Down lead vocalist Serj Tankian. Damn if it ain’t bangin’. You can ask my neighbors. I’ve listened to this record 15 times in the past three days, and now they’re…
Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but there appears to be a gradual rock migration. A glacier-like shift toward harmony and melody. An opportunity for popular music to embrace art over gimmicks–musicianship over parent-hating rhetoric and latex masks from Spencer’s Gifts. The success of the Strokes, Wilco and even Weezer demonstrates what’s…
With the Warped Tour sadly come and gone for another year and Dashboard Confessional’s next trip to town still a couple of months away, what’s a misunderstood emo-rocker to do for support this week? Easy: Head to the Ridglea Theater on Friday night for a four-band lineup that should soothe…
Earnest yet slightly lecherous singer-songwriter John Mayer too freshman-friendly for you? Wary of getting caught in a rabid-fan trap at the Smirnoff that you can’t back out of ’cause they love him too much, baby? Check out New Yorker Chris Lee, at Dan’s Silverleaf in Denton on Saturday night, instead:…
What follows is an inbox-to-inbox discussion on the merits (and demerits) of Apple’s iTunes Music Store conducted recently via e-mail by Dallas Observer associate editor Eric Celeste, managing editor Patrick Williams, pop culture critic Robert Wilonsky and music editor Zac Crain. Eric Celeste: Gentlemen: I believe the question before us…
Shelley King is onstage at a smoky punk dive on an oppressively humid summer night, hundreds of miles from home, in the middle of the Midwest. It’s close to 100 degrees in the bar, and as she plays guitar and sings, even her knuckles are sweating. Her eclectic country songs…
Read the other day that Macy Gray’s Id–the album, though what she sells is what she thinks–didn’t move because of its being released before the smoke cleared post-September 11; sorry, didn’t buy it (the excuse, not the disc, though come to think of it…). The product didn’t move because it…
Here’s where my anti-iTunes stance proves out, in the Concept Album about cubicle losers and middle-class yutzes and the forgotten schmoes out there for whom love’s still a grade-school daydream 20 years on and satisfaction means keeping the day job you hated in the first friggin’ place. All Fountains of…
Tricky’s ascension to worldwide critical acclaim and not-unimpressive commercial prosperity was one of the more unlikely success stories of the 1990s, since for all it shared with the down-tempo chill-out fluff it’s inspired, Tricky’s music was the singularly difficult and complex product of a singularly difficult and complex mind. Maxinquaye…
A double shot of creepy-ass California indie eccentricity awaits the bravely patient. Up first, fêted singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart, a scruffily handsome 22-year-old San Francisco Academy of Art dropout whose debut album, Oh Me Oh My…The Way the Day Goes By the Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the…
Against all odds, the Warped Tour isn’t the only chance you’ve got this week to catch overheated punk-inflected pop bands (or pop-inflected punk bands) sweating it out onstage for a few dollars and the opportunity to bleed American for 45 minutes or so. Brand New and Moneen hit The Door…
Used to be 33 bands (by my count, anyway, but I was told there would be little math in this course) would play over two, maybe three days; used to call ’em “festivals” back in my day, the late ’80s. Now it’s 25 minutes by one-and-done bands that sound gassed…
People ask me all the time, “Why do you listen to that Widespread Panic crap?” The worst part is that I usually have no intelligent response. I usually say, “Either you get it or you don’t get it, plain and simple,” even when I have three days to come up…
After a long couple of months’ worth of freedom fries, freedom toast and supremely disappointing freedom kissing, we quarrelsome Americans finally get an overdue helping of genuine, uncut Frenchitude, in the form of a visit by Paris-based sisters Hélène and Célia Faussart, the presumably peace-loving ladies of Les Nubians and…
“I paid for it already,” White Light Motorcade front man Harley Dinardo snaps. He’s fighting with a gas-station clerk about an ice cream sandwich. “I’m trying to tell her that I paid for it already,” he says. After he smooths things out he heads back outside to the van. “The…
It’s Friday night and New York City is gearing up for its 13th consecutive weekend of rain. Thirteen weekends, 13 rains: dull, bland, constant rain; drizzles thin as mist; warm sudden gales that strike and retreat like guerrilla warriors. More. But there’s no kidding around about this rain, not tonight:…
If I’d gotten that job as Sony Music Soundtrax pooh-bah like I should have, I’d have called this 14-song soundtrack to the second installment in what fun-loving humans can only hope will end up a many-part series Charlie’s Angles: You’re only likely to not find something you can dig if…
Smack in the middle of Prince Paul’s witty and acerbic hip-hop satire, Politics of the Business, DJ Premier of Gang Starr voices an ethic that expresses both the heart of Prince Paul’s critique of hip-hop and the promise of Gang Starr’s new joint, Ownerz. What Primo explains is that for…
In case just listening to the schizophrenic You Forgot It in People leaves you scratching your head, it comes equipped with an underlined thesis statement. Evidently the record is “designed to remind us that music still has room to be re-created.” Ambitious. “It flows like a compilation of sounds for…
Someone must’ve done the alt-rock fairy a favor: This summer brings us not only former Lemonhead-professional junkie Evan Dando’s unexpected return to record-making and show-playing, but also the long-awaited jump-start of ex-Weezer-Rentals dude Matt Sharp’s solo career. His new four-song Puckett’s Versus the Country Boy EP isn’t at all what…
