Two options for a disorienting Saturday night this week: Stay home and watch NBC’s Critical Assembly, in which four college students build a nuclear bomb just “to prove how easily it can be done,” but then regret their hubris when terrorists steal the damn thing. (“Mayhem follows,” TV Guide assures.)…
“Never thought I’d still be doing this,” Charlie Gilder says, laughing a little. On July 9, it’ll be 20 years since Gilder and his partner, Steve Asbeck, opened the Twilite Room at 2111 Commerce St., sandwiched between Deep Ellum and downtown. The building is actually about 20 yards from where…
By now, it would seem, there is no story about Fleetwood Mac left to tell. No snort has gone undocumented, no betrayal unchecked, no argument unheard. They sold millions of albums to people who knew the soap opera and wanted the soundtrack; they sold tons of concert tickets to those…
At some point, Evan Dando disappeared. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it occurred; it was more of a fade than a moment of spontaneous disintegration. But by the second half of the ’90s–after a series of minor successes as the front man for Boston alt-rock darlings the Lemonheads, and…
Joe Budden’s self-titled debut comes to us courtesy of “Pump It Up,” a seemingly omnipresent club hit, on which producer Just Blaze turns a sample from Kool and the Gang’s “Soul Vibration” into a stop-start, high-energy rave-up. Not surprisingly, the underground success of “Pump It Up” and its lesser-known predecessor,…
Only the Clientele could write a song called “House on Fire” that evokes no urgency, heat or danger. It shuffles along at about the same unworried pace as the rest of the trio’s The Violet Hour–technically their full-length debut, since 2000’s Suburban Light was a collection of singles–as if a…
Little point to picking up the Hulk soundtrack, unless you feel like owning another Danny Elfman score for a comic-book film adaptation that sounds exactly like every other Danny Elfman score for a comic-book film adaptation. Tacked onto the end of the disc, however, is “Set Me Free,” the debut…
On his last two records, 2001’s Sweet Tea and now Blues Singer, Buddy Guy has been retrofitted in an attempt to find a new (read: younger) audience. This isn’t really a bad move. On Sweet Tea, Guy explains through his guitar that modern rock music could not exist without his…
So here we are: Texas’ own trio of harmony-singin’, Toby Keith-hatin’, faux-hawk-sportin’, bluegrass-appropriatin’, controversy-causin’ hell-raisers return to the state they’re ashamed to share with the president, the launching pad that gave them to the world, whether or not the world was ready. And what is Texas to do with them?…
The two buzzed-about shabby-chic bands hitting Rubber Gloves this week–Portland’s Glass Candy, who sometimes go by the cooler-sounding Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre, on Saturday; and New York’s A.R.E. Weapons, who should sometimes go by the more accurate A.R.E. You Serious?, on Tuesday–would lose to the Dixie Chicks by…
Contrary to this paper’s title–and this column’s, as well–we are not always observant. For example, it took us awhile, as these things tend to do, but we finally realized that the building at 3510 Commerce St. was not actually abandoned. We drive past the spot every day on our way…
At a moment when one of the two biggest rappers in the world is parlaying a life spent selling drugs and getting shot into a multiplatinum, multiformat, multimillion-dollar career, and the other is doing the same with a background filled with mental abuse and evidently treacherous women, there isn’t a…
On any given night the Mink Lungs spit blood and spin hula hoops, preach hellfire and brimstone and perform death-defying stunts. Oh, yeah, and they’re a band, too. “When you look out and people aren’t getting into the music, sometimes you have to pull out the blood,” Mink Lungs drummer…
There was a time, maybe 30 years ago, maybe longer, when a guy like Joe Pernice had a chance. He didn’t need a big label, didn’t need big money behind him. He didn’t need a sure-thing single that the boys in the promotion department could take to radio, didn’t need…
What would you do if everything fell apart? Fight or flight? Accept it with a whimper or hold out for a bang? Attempt to pick up the pieces or start over from scratch? Pessimists–or pragmatists–may carry around the latest edition of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, but most people prefer…
You are either for Tindersticks or you are against them. If you are for them, you are very, very for them–and all you need to know about the band’s sixth and latest album, Waiting for the Moon, is that it follows the Trouble Every Day soundtrack on a breadcrumb trail…
Grandaddy’s 2000 album, The Sophtware Slump, dripped with millennial dread: Pictures of broken keyboards on post-apocalyptic dirt floors were strewn throughout the CD booklet. Tracks such as “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot” spoke directly to the times: “Adrift again 2000 man/You lost your maps/You lost your plans.” Grandaddy…
Have you listened to the White Stripes’ Elephant through headphones yet? I just did, and I can’t believe how sloppy some of it is: that raggedy-ass piano intro to “Little Acorns,” Jack’s guitar chug-a-lug in “Black Math,” the killer electric-piano blurts in the otherwise Queen-precise “There’s No Home for You…
Here’s a list of the top 10 things I’d rather do on Sunday than go to Ozzfest, with each item keyed to the Ozzfest act I’d most like to do it with: 1. Go to Home Depot and pick out new wall-to-wall carpeting for my breakfast nook (Ozzy Osbourne). 2…
The timing couldn’t be any more perfect, really. A week after Eisley’s high-profile tour with Coldplay, the band will headline Buzz-Oven’s pair of all-ages shows at the Ridglea Theater (June 21) and Trees (June 28). For Aden Holt, Buzz-Oven’s boss, it can’t get much better than that. (If you’re wondering…
Kelly Clarkson is like you and me in at least one respect: She, too, is sick of Kelly Clarkson. “My friends are like, ‘If I see you on one more interview, dude, I’m going to kill you,'” says the first American Idol, sitting in the conference room of the Dallas…
In “The Driveby,” one of several side-splitting skits on storied hip-hop producer Prince Paul’s clever new concept album Politics of the Business, Paul finds himself confronted on the street by a hyper, exasperated fan. “I did the worm, man. I used to breakdance, man. I fuckin’ popped, locked and rocked,…
