The Booker T.-Berklee grad was Wynton Marsalis’ prodigy-acolyte, so it figures most of his dozen-album catalog plays it straight–real standard-time stuff, more or less, down to the Charlie Parker trib of ’95 and the tangled-up-in-string-section collection that was his last release. But Hargrove, all of 33, fares better when not…
Not since the Beastie Boys swapped Budweiser for Buddhism have party animals so suddenly embraced social awareness like NOFX, a band whose only previous foray into activism involved telling off feminists who denounced its sexist lyrics. Now, front man Fat Mike has discovered his inner Noam Chomsky: “I never looked…
Unless you knew Miss Cleo before the feds took her down, I seriously doubt you could’ve predicted Wednesday night’s bill at Gypsy Tea Room, or that some of your hippest friends and neighbors will probably be there, nodding along to the sweet guitar-pop sounds of Nada Surf and Sondre Lerche…
Ready for three more so-so emo bands to separate you from your hard-earned eight bucks? Elliott, Vendetta Red and Mae, three of the so-so-iest emo bands around, sure are. Elliott drops in in support of the new Song in the Air, the Louisville outfit’s third album and its first since…
Usually you can count on the radio industry’s annual rollout of springtime showdowns to provide a couple of jolts of life across the drudgery of the pre-summer day-to-day. Not this year: This weekend both KDGE-FM’s EdgeFest and the KISS-FM Party, each aimed at a different slice of the lucrative teen-market…
Coming across Dallas songwriter Max Stalling’s One of the Ways in the Texas music section of the local record store is like discovering a pack of Gauloise cigarettes in a truckload of Virginia Slims or a copy of Camus’ The Stranger in a box of Harlequin romances. By quietly breaking…
He thought he’d be dead by now, eaten up with the cancer that invaded his lungs and conquered his body. All he wanted, only last fall, was to live long enough to see the latest James Bond movie, Die Another Day, whose title he took as instruction. Warren Zevon revealed…
Sly hip-hop futurism touches down at Gypsy Tea Room on Sunday night with a triple bill featuring Barcelona-based beatmaster Prefuse 73, ex-Antipop Consortium oddball Beans and Tortoise offshoot A Grape Dope. One Word Extinguisher, Prefuse dude Scott Herren’s new Warp disc, is more of the meticulously microprocessed soundscaping he introduced…
We’ve broken out the short pants a bit earlier this year, which can mean only one thing: Summer, God bless, is already upon us. Either that or we couldn’t find any clean jeans. While that’s also a likely scenario, there’s more evidence to support the first conclusion. People’s 1A: If…
Whatever the Vancouver-based New Pornographers’ actual expectations were for their 1999 debut, Mass Romantic, it sounded like an album they recorded for their own amusement. Not that it’s lo-fi–far from it–it just emanates a secret mirth, as if they’d just invented a machine capable of tweaking TV theme songs into…
What with White Stripes a month on shelves, and the Rapture and Radiohead soon to come, 2003 is proving a year heavy on the “hotly anticipated.” Among these, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ first full-length, Fever to Tell, has likely caused its fair share of bated breath-related injuries, and now that it’s…
Last year, the skinny white English dude Mike Skinner convinced lots of skinny white American dudes that Eminem wasn’t the only skinny white rapper dude worth lending an ear; on his potent debut as the Streets, Original Pirate Material, Skinner countered the widespread American idea that Brits can’t rap with…
Though Smog’s Bill Callahan has gradually progressed to a higher-fi sound and properly synchronized arrangements, he still tosses off unusual lines that ache with an off-center Midwest beauty. In “Our Anniversary” he sings of “clipping the wings of your morning flight,” and the gorgeous “Driving” echoes with an equally spare,…
With riffs as thick as their skulls, Godsmack is a band of unabashed metal meatheads. Which doesn’t necessarily invalidate their music; like Jean-Claude Van Damme films, there’s something to be said for mindless kicks. But after three albums of crushing, monster-truck rock, Godsmack’s Dirt-simple approach is growing exceedingly monotonous. Initially…
Last year at some point, we forget when, we heard rumors that NextStage, the 5,000-or-so-capacity concert venue in Grand Prairie, was on the verge of bankruptcy, on its way out. Millions and millions spent to get the joint up and running, we were told, and not a dime in return…
Cursive front man Tim Kasher recites the incident clinically. “It ended up being one of those really unusual life and art reflecting each other coincidences that we had already named the album The Ugly Organ,” Kasher says dryly. He’s describing the collapsed lung and resulting surgery that landed him in…
In conversation, Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller of electro-rock duo Adult. come across as a modular unit, the modern update of American Gothic’s catatonic Midwestern archetypes. They break away from their daily routine of running their own record label, Ersatz Audio, to answer the interviewer’s questions succinctly and sparingly…
When Stephen Malkmus walks into the conference room at Matador Records’ New York offices, he’s wearing these enormous eyeglasses, like something someone working in an airplane hangar would wear to protect his or her eyes from flying debris. And he’s got this piece of napkin-sized fabric that he keeps rubbing…
Shame Maria McKee couldn’t lift the name of Madonna’s label for her own upstart; seven years since Geffen made an orphan of its once-beloved daughter by abusing her Life is Sweet, she returns as the real renegade of this twosome, who came of age and stardom at roughly the same…
If you’ve chosen this weekend as the one to abandon all goodhearted indie revivalism–and, if so, let me be the first to congratulate you for quite an accomplishment–be sure to steer clear of Gypsy Tea Room on Saturday night: Brainy arena-rock dorks OK Go and flowery ’60s-pop naïfs the Essex…
Look, I’m as big an Avril Lavigne supporter as the next ninth-grade girl for whom Christina Aguilera has ceased to be a positive role model; I mean, I’ve never hung out in a dingy Singaporean brothel with oversized stuffed animals and lubed-up bodybuilders running around either, so I can certainly…
We here at the Dallas Observer have been griping for years about downtown Dallas, about the need for more entertainment options in the area, not to mention the need for more people to stick around to enjoy the ones that are already there. So far, that means a handful of…
