How does one embark on a career as a rock troubadour? Perhaps it’s by following the backwoods roads from one nowhere burg to another, crossing the fields like an itinerant ballplayer and tossing off heartfelt songs like Johnny Appleseed until they finally take root with the strangers along the way…
If there’s one thing the world most definitely does not need right now, it’s another watery mix CD from some overhyped trance DJ–you know, the ones with the tastefully modernist cover art (invariably featuring a handsome European staring meaningfully into space) and the interminable synth build-ups that eventually crest in…
Dallas got a big helping of plastic pop last week, when No Doubt and the Faint brought their retrofitted robot rock to the Bronco Bowl, but those new wavers looking for a safer night out–hey, the Faint’s first video just got banned by MTV, and Gwen Stefani’s tank tops keep…
Less than a year ago the smart money would’ve been on Alanis Morissette and Bryan Adams, two Canadians totally convinced of overblown, overproduced pop-rock’s persistent relevance. Surely no one would’ve expected The Ironic One to be joined by Ryan Adams, a young American singer with an airtight reputation for astoundingly…
Remy Shand’s debut album, The Way I Feel, couldn’t feel, sound, even smell more Motown if it had emerged from Marvin Gaye’s basement or the lips of Stevie Wonder. While Motown is, in fact, the label that released The Way I Feel back in March, the album did not originate…
Sort-of-local chanteuse Norah Jones has been getting flak lately for the smoothness of her Come Away With Me, the seamlessness with which she synthesizes the blues, pop, folk and jazz stuff she hears in her head. It’s an argument that’s as understandable as it is frustrating: Come Away With Me…
Ghetto Fame-Us has a new record in the can, And Then There Was Us!, a long-gestating sequel to 1999’s Add On! (We’re generally not fans of exclamation points in album titles, but Ghetto Fame-Us has had to work so hard just to get these things out, slack must be cut.)…
For years the album has existed like a rumor, like a myth–the secret spoken about in hushed tones, out of fear that to mention its name too loudly would scare it away forever. It wasn’t even an album at all, more like the spoken-word outline of the Great American Novel…
Everyone should have been asleep by then or, at least, getting there, and most had called it a night long ago, stumbling back to their hotels and homes. It was late even by rock-and-roll standards, closing in on 5 a.m., but no one inside Austin’s new Acoustic Café was ready…
It’s tough to be the Kings. Ask Bryan Ledford: four shows, count ’em, in 24 hours. That was yesterday’s itinerary. “Oh, man,” he says, when asked to recount them. “Let’s see; we played late Friday night from 12 to 3, then we played at the Starkville Festival at noon yesterday…
“‘It’s coming,’ she finally explained. ‘Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.'” Thus said a villager in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. She was describing the arrival of the first-ever train in the village of Macondo. The description could very well describe the sound…
Pink, the new Madonna? Doesn’t seem possible–certainly didn’t in 2000, when “There U Go” introduced Philadelphia homegirl Alecia Moore as the latest in a long line of producer/svengali Dallas Austin’s bad girls gone badder–but that’s what the English press are saying we’re saying, and you know how accurate their fortunetelling…
And so the formal coagulation of Atlanta crunk-hop and Philadelphia neo-soul continues, propelling two of the scenes’ new stars westward to Dallas for a night of full-throated singing and the tactile musicality this movement toward precious organicity is quickly formulating. Goodie Mob boss/Dungeon Family member Cee-Lo makes no attempt to…
Like the clattering, asthmatic wheeze of the industrial revolution as it slowly relinquished influence to a burgeoning new age, The Faint’s music resurrects the vacuous bounce of ’80s synth-pop to express the unsatisfying rumble of an increasingly mechanized, impersonal world. The insistence of their gloomy, retro-groove recalls The Cure flavored…
One of these things is not like the others. But which is it? The multiplatinum pop-punk band that’s been around longer than any of the bazillion younger groups currently frolicking in its wake? Or the younger multiplatinum pop-punk band that’s introduced a bazillion prepubescent boys to their first dick jokes?…
Best new band we’ve come across in a while: Robot Monster Weekend. Performing here and there since late last year, Robot Monster Weekend recently released its debut EP, the six-song Turn Down Your Sorrow It’s…Robot Monster Weekend, recorded at The Echo Lab with Matt Barnhart. Singer-guitarists Mike Gargiulo and Aaron…
Perhaps no one has summed up Johnny Cash better than Richard M. Nixon: “Yours is truly the voice of America, as rich and strong as our nation itself.” Cash’s nearly 50-year recording career has produced an enormous body of essential American music, most of which has been spottily issued domestically…
It’s easy to make Damian Higgins laugh. Doesn’t take much effort at all, really. The key, as it turns out, is to question how much work it actually takes to put together a mix CD or, specifically, doubt the amount of work it takes him to assemble one. He’s not…
To hear a fan say it, you’d have thought somebody killed his brother: “They sold out.” That sentence, and its many variations, has been a part of punk rock since the Sex Pistols signed with EMI. Granted, that move worked out OK–it wasn’t called The Great Rock & Roll Swindle…
For those of us whose tastes in culture-watching run to the absurd, there was a certain giddy joy that came from walking through the local record store and seeing the cover art of Andrew Wilkes-Krier’s I Get Wet reproduced poster-size on the walls…and then seeing the album on the racks,…
As blues drama goes, Buddy Guy may be feeling old this week, but at least he doesn’t feel superfluous. Jon Spencer, the mutton-chopped leader of the blues-exploding outfit that bears his name, has seen the garage-rock/dirty-blues resurrection he’s been leading nearly singlehandedly for a decade swing into vogue in the…
Brendan Benson’s story is as familiar to fans of homegrown neoclassical pop as the records so many of its practitioners look up to: Signed to Virgin (apparently in an attempt to woo that moneyed power-pop market Matthew Sweet and Jellyfish broke wide-open), he released the accomplished One Mississippi in 1996…
