There are, I suspect, exactly two reactions to the music video for the Dave Matthews Band’s “Everyday,” the one where the big frumpy guy who you at first think is a panhandler stands on the street and asks strangers for hugs: “Man, this Dave Matthews character has really done it…
If Dave Matthews’ sappy songcraft sounds like a pretty soggy way to spend your Tuesday night, consider taking in Buddy Guy’s set at Saturday’s House of Blues Music Festival first–the Chicago blues legend might scare you so bad you’ll appreciate Matthews’ aural analgesic. Just a few years ago, that might…
When it debuted with 1996’s Fuzzy Logic, Super Furry Animals never even came close to figuring into the whole “Oasis vs. Blur vs. everyone else” equation that the brief Britpop invasion wrote on the U.S. blackboard. Which is a shame, since the huge melodies on that disc out-popped–or at least…
[DARYL] and Slowride’s month-and-change tour of the better part of the country makes a pit stop in Dallas on May 2 so the bands can toast their new (or pretty close, anyway) records before heading to the West Coast. (Both bands, along with Lewis, will also perform at Good Records…
Alice and Blood Money, two disparate yet profoundly connected works being released the same day (May 7), are credited solely to Tom Waits, which is a bit like recognizing only the shopkeeper for the loaf of bread without acknowledging those who baked it and provided the ingredients. They’re recognizably Waits…
Today, any geek with a computer and a dream can have his own Internet radio station without jumping through all those government hoops that limit the number and broadcasting range of U.S. stations. This is a huge boon for listeners, especially those with poor radio reception, or ones who want…
Tony Hajjar is in Vancouver, recording a new album with his band, which is exactly where he should be and not where you’d expect. Let’s back up. In 2000, At the Drive-In, an El Paso quintet featuring Hajjar on drums, released Relationship of Command, the group’s fourth album and the…
Were you drawn to Cornershop’s left-field 1997 hit “Brimful of Asha” because it sounded like nothing in your record collection or because it sounded like everything in your record collection condensed down to five and a half minutes? That’s the question these polyglot London-based zanies have made a career out…
Buncha benefits happening around D-D-FW this week and next. First up is a shindig for the Denton Humane Society at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios on April 27, featuring performances by Will Johnson and Scott Danbom of Centro-matic, The Baptist Generals, Failure Plus and Southpaw Preachers, with all proceeds going to…
If hip-hop is indeed “the proverbial sad clown of music,” as New York rapper J-Live proclaimed on 1999’s unreleased and unofficial anthem, “The Best Part,” then J-Live himself is quite possibly the art form’s Emmett Kelly. Despite personal and professional heartache, he’s managed to maintain his optimism and love for…
As a gesture of rebellion, the photo-shoot middle finger is sooo 20th century; at this point, an artist would be served just as well by donning a raccoon coat and strumming a ukulele. When even MTV’s Carson Daly, perhaps the least threatening celebrity younger than Ed McMahon, assumes the position…
Fans of retro-minded indie pop that tries as hard as it can to push past its low-budget boundaries might want to get their paisley shirts dry-cleaned today, as a quartet of well-regarded touring bands hits Dallas this weekend for two shows that should offer plenty in the way of reconstructed…
The lot at the corner of Fry and Oak streets in Denton, next door to Voertman’s bookstore and across from the Cork Screw, still sits empty. There are a few trees and bushes, freckles of weeds on the packed dirt and trash, beer bottles and cans, fliers for shows and…
“Every time, I get nervous,” says rapper Gift of Gab at soundcheck for a February performance at L.A.’s Wiltern Theatre. “Like, two minutes before I go on. Every time.” Across the stage, DJ/producer Chief Xcel fiddles with the knobs and needles on his turntables. “Can you put my MPC at…
When Hunter Brown was a kid back in Georgia, he used to listen to records in his room and try to play along on the guitar. It’s a necessary rite of passage for all players–male or female, genre irrelevant–but where other kids his age might have been working out to…
In 1998, around the time Painted From Memory–his team-up with Burt Bacharach–hit stores, Elvis Costello gave up on the idea of playing rock and roll, or so he said. But he didn’t really need to put it in words: Costello had already spent much of the 1990s taking sidesteps, sparring…
There’s no escape from Tenacious D: Jack Black and Kyle Gass are in Foo Fighters videos, alone and together in various films (Shallow Hal, Cradle Will Rock and Saving Silverman, to name a few), popping up in the middle of a Mr. Show rerun on HBO or blowing the regulars…
To get the most inevitable, awkward facts out of the way, Joe Preston used to be in Earth, he used to be in the Melvins, he used to be in Men’s Recovery Project and he used to be in The Need. Now, there’s something called Thrones. From Olympia, Washington, Thrones’…
You can’t buy the kind of publicity Wilco received last year, when Reprise declined to release the newly completed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (see “Sunken Treasure,” September 20, 2001). Blocked from direct access to the mass market, Jeff Tweedy and company schlepped the whole album over to Wilco’s Web site (www.wilcoworld.net),…
The “official” record–Stereo, credited to Paul Westerberg, remember him?–is sloppy in an “artful” way, meaning songs abruptly end when the tape runs out while others collapse when the guy singing them peters out; they’re demos, or sound like them, assembled from two years’ worth of basement tapes, literally. The “unofficial”…
The man on the phone, M. Sayyid of Antipop Consortium, is furious. A minute into the conversation, he’s spitting out words for distance and accuracy; his voice is one part disbelief, two parts disgust, with a twist of disappointment. He’s tired of thinking about when DMX left the group awhile…
There’s a fine line between being an artist and a professional personality, and when you add the hip-hop concept of personality to the mix, things can get weird. An unmistakable alpha girl, Princess Superstar is all-American in a pretty wonderful way: bleached blond, entrepreneurial, earnest and calculatedly trashy. She’s gimmicky…
