Now that they’ve busted up, like Pumpkins smashed on curbs the night after Halloween, it’s time to admit most everything post-Siamese Dream was way overrated by the kids who found much meaning in bald Billy’s dreary fart-rock; look, when the words don’t say nothin’, they don’t mean nothin’. (Yeah, yeah–God…
Whitney Houston’s return after an eight-year absence, 1998’s My Love Is Your Love, should not have worked as well as it did: Houston had firmly entered her career’s second decade, so hiring R&B’s hippest producers to modernize her sound seemed like a last grasp at the credibility younger, edgier singers…
No. 17 on my List of Things I’d Like to Someday Know: why every other band of young British guys partial to swirly guitars and with a thing for groove eventually ends up aping Exile on Main Street and wearing too much denim. Primal Scream, the Jesus and Mary Chain,…
For true, hip-hop has put its head to many strange bedfellows as it continues to grow in size, stature and power. Ghetto celebrities and unrepentant criminals share the stage with enlightened truthsayers and silently extraordinary designers and technical innovators, and everyone is scheming for a piece of the power and…
Last week, the Star tabloid and New York Post, ahem, “reported” that Burleson native and American Idol Kelly Clarkson wasn’t the “doe-eyed amateur she appeared to be” when she was crowned Queen of Crappy Pop in September. Yeah, and Michael Jackson used to be black, Chevy Chase used to be…
I hate pretentious album titles that try to sell you Impending Doom. Are these guys fortunetellers? What do they know that we don’t? If we’re all gonna die soon, anyway, why are they even charging money for the CD? Why not just give it away free as a public service?…
Otherwise known as Phil “Homer Henderson” Bennison and two other guys (Paul Harrington on harmonica, Stan Ridgway-style; Dick Cordes, brushing drums and ringing bells and shaking maracas), the Starlings come bearing a Yuletide EP that clocks in at just more than 11 minutes–perfect, I’d say, given my Jew attention span…
We are white. We long to be funky. We want elasticity; we want the rubber knees, the fluid flow, the boiling blood, the innate understanding of the rhythms we pine to create. We want the funk, are willing to give up everything for the funk. But it remains buried by…
I began hating Christmas albums around the same time I figured out there was no Santa Claus: a long time ago and well before my parents knew any different. In both cases, I played along for as long as I could. Well, OK, that’s not quite true. As far as…
When Chomsky played The Door on November 23, singer-guitarist Sean Halleck announced that it was officially the group’s final show supporting last year’s Onward Quirky Soldiers. They weren’t going to play another gig until they were finished with a new record for a new label. But that’s all he said…
Near the end of The Roots’ sixth album is a song (the 10-minute-plus “Water”) that underlines, italicizes and bold faces the problem that has always plagued the group: They are too smart, too thoughtful, too much for hip-hop. Sliding over drummer ?uestlove and bassist Leon Hubbard’s stuttering strut, head voice…
In the early 1990s, Richard Buckner detached himself from his longtime band, the Buckets, to become one of alt-country’s rising stars. Although steeped in traditional country and old-timey lore, Buckner opted for a spacey folk sound closer to Tim Buckley and Leonard Cohen. A major label contract with MCA resulted…
If you think incensed player haters restrict their animosity to large-living hip-hop stars, mentally unstable R&B songbirds and Fred Durst, you obviously haven’t gotten a swig of the Hater-ade currently being spilled online over these two unlikely outfits: Icelandic tone poets Sigur Rós and French-Canadian noiseniks Godspeed You! Black Emperor…
Trailblazing partners Missy Elliott and Timbaland function as musical time travelers, teleporting in every few years to show hip-hop what its future looks like. With their latest collaboration, Under Construction, the future might morph into its barely distant past. The album’s musical tracks begin with something almost blasphemous to the…
There are but a handful of Christmas comps worthy of being stuffed into a stocking; most deserve having a sock stuck in ’em, as they’re usually little more than label money-makers and time-killers stuck on a shelf in late October and thrown in the remainder bin come December 26. Especially…
Christina Aguilera’s problem has always been overcompensation. On her debut, the young waif was so eager to show off her pipes she mostly sounded horribly overwrought and warbly, like Mariah Carey hopped up on diet pills. On her sultry new second album, Aguilera is just as eager, only now it’s…
Jack Ashford, a hulking and dapper man whose smooth face, enormous grin and cheerfully deep voice make him appear much younger than 68, warms to his surroundings. “I feel the nostalgia in here,” says the percussionist, gazing around the room of exposed bricks that once housed a radio station’s production…
Alt-rock pace car Frank Black simultaneously released his seventh and eighth solo albums this summer, proving to Pixies lovers, two-track-recording aficionados and those partial to bizarre flights of surreal lyrical fancy that you should never underestimate a man who’s changed his name at least two times in his life. The…
Consider this a palate cleanser. It was almost three years ago. George W. Bush was teaching the world how to laugh. People were investing in something called the Internet. This column was called Street Beat. And we were fairly new on the job. Since everyone seemed to be caught up…
Mississippi’s 3 Doors Down make top-notch second-notch rock: “Kryptonite,” the big one from their debut, 2000’s The Better Life, married cleanly corrosive guitars, efficient rock-dude vocals, a Nickelback chorus that actually swung and a snare drum riff that made it easy to pick out on the radio. Away From the…
Not as revelatory as the 58 tracks on Volumes 1-3, not as revolutionary as the 14 spread across Volume 4, but more rewarding than its predecessors nonetheless since this marks the spot separating Essential Dylan and Disposable Zimmerman. Before Bobby Z. hooked up with his Rolling Thunder Revue, an all-star…
The debut record from former Soundgarden front guy Chris Cornell and the three Other Guys from Rage Against the Machine is here, the Rock Franchise finally rollin’ out the new IPO and branding strategy. There was a lot of political music biz dickin’ around while everyone figured out how they…
