You get the sense Dwight Yoakam’s still “country” ’cause he needs the hat and looks good in leather pants that end in boot points; otherwise he might have switched genres long ago, having tapped this one bone-dry. Not that Population Me, his first since parting ways with longtime home Reprise,…
What would happen if you found a bunch of slides from a 1977 McDonald’s corporate-marketing meeting and, in a flash of inspiration, turned them into a goofy song? What if you performed the song on a 1981 Casio keyboard, with your 9-year-old daughter on drums and your spouse showing the…
She’s a tricky one, this exile from the record bins. She tells truths, but never really makes clear whose, which confused those who loved her “honesty” the first two times ’round and alienated those who thought the third album too third-person to matter. (Liz Phair singing as a male was…
On their fourth album, Clem Snide shows they have a Soft Spot for the other side of summer, the mellow melancholy that creeps up on you at the end of a lazy backyard barbecue or the ash-end of a bonfire at the beach. It’s a narrow window of time when…
San Francisco resident Topher Lafata has the same bright idea lots of other former indie-rockers are riding these days: Ditch the electric guitars, mopey breakup songs and human drummers that the mid-’90s proved could be so useful and feed all that pent-up postgrad angst into the computer instead, sharpening a…
If, like me, you found yourself at the dentist’s office last week, desperately thumbing through People in an attempt to stave off the pain you went to the dentist’s office to experience in the first place, you might have read what radio DJ/astute cultural observer Rick Dees thinks of California-based…
In the May 29 edition of Scene, Heard, we related a story we’d heard a few days earlier involving Josh T. Pearson and Andy Young of Lift to Experience and a well-worn boot. We’ll let Young provide you with a recap: “This is it folks. Your chance to own a…
The home shared by Budapest One singer-guitarist Keith Killoren and keyboard player Chad Stockslager leaves little room for interpretation. The living room houses a few shelves dedicated entirely to the Beatles, and Stockslager’s bedroom is plastered with music posters, the most prominent of which feature Elvis Costello, the Who and…
Metallica needs an image overhaul the way front man James Hetfield needed to dry out. It’s been almost six years since the band bestowed an album of original studio material upon the world, and in the interim, Metallica has dropped dud after dud. Since 1997’s lukewarm Reload, there’s been a…
Mogwai’s music is a web of contradictions. A band given to grand gestures, yet the music finds its power in subtlety: delicate moments accumulate into something bigger than the sum of those parts–and then, for an instant, the bottom drops out. Multi-instrumental and dense, yet the wall-of-sound is as looming…
I’ve got absolutely no problem with the Y2K+ pop model of producer-as-star: Timbaland; the Neptunes; Jermaine Dupri; shit, Jerry Finn–these folks practically guarantee a good time, with high-level artistry an occasional fringe benefit and brand-name consistency a handy way to organize skipping around the radio dial. But the Matrix, as…
Ether Teeth is the second album of haphazardly assembled folk-hop from Fog, an alias for Minnesota solo act Andrew Broder. Glaringly apparent here, as it was on last year’s self-titled effort, is the fact that Broder is no revelation as a songwriter; he is, however, an adventurous manipulator of sound,…
Myopic indie types do a lot of jawing about the Philadelphia band Lilys’ incredible stylistic breadth, but it says something significant about underground rock when a group that has simply channeled different strains of British guitar-pop–shoegazing noise, Kinksian strum, psychedelic poesy–over the past decade is celebrated for its open ears…
Third Eye Blind front man Stephan Jenkins once led a semi-charmed kind of life: His band’s self-titled debut enjoyed both commercial success and mild critical acclaim (I loved it!); he spent time as Charlize Theron’s boyfriend; he got to indulge his pet hobby of R&B production, helming a cover of…
“Once upon a time, I was wandering in a magic forest,” says Rooney front man Robert Carmine, in a voice familiar to anyone who ever experienced nursery school story time. “And I ran into an old wise man who gave me a magic bean. And the bean was, like, a…
When Ruthie Foster steps onstage, she is strikingly quiet. Her presence is quiet; her voice is quiet. Her small frame has a language that is very quiet. No divas here, it says. No bullshit, either. And you wonder if this is the same blues-gospel-folk belter who is creating a stir…
In February, we wrote a story about the Deathray Davies. It was titled “Group Sounds,” and in it we made the following point, neatly summed up by the subhead: “The Deathray Davies used to be John Dufilho. That’s not true anymore.” We came to this conclusion because the group had…
Dunno quite what those sobbing over the frigid mechanics of Kid A and Amnesiac were complaining about; I like Thom Yorke’s voice for how it sounds and not for what it says, which normally isn’t much beyond the woe-am-me nonsense every wan Britpopper over the age of consent has to…
The Deftones’ Chino Moreno and Staind’s Aaron Lewis are two of metal’s most emotive front men. Unlike most headbangers, they trade in tears as much as testosterone, though the two take different routes to your heart. The more subtle of the two lyrically, Moreno conveys emotion through his voice more…
As someone who hasn’t yet tired of the Flaming Lips’ big-hearted grown-up whimsy, I keep trying to find ways to excuse the half-assedness of the band’s new Flight Test EP: “They’ve been busy on the road becoming the aw-shucks Gallaghers of major-label art-rock”; “You can’t expect full-blown brilliance from a…
Though there are certainly occasions when the miles-of-smiles pop-punk proffered by the likes of Good Charlotte, Simple Plan and Bowling for Soup makes my day that much better, sometimes–like, say, on trash day, or when CSI is a rerun–I get a hankering for some three-chord monte of a darker variety…
Two helpings of rootsy strum-and-twang from unexpected sources this week, beginning with an appearance by the hardy indie vets in Jets to Brazil at Trees on Friday night. Singer-guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach, as every magazine and newspaper profile written for the rest of his life will happily inform you, used to…
