The natives are restless in Omaha. With their Great Plains indie-rock empire well in hand, the luminaries of Nebraska’s Saddle Creek records are turning their attention outward to the problems and hypocrisies afflicting this country and its questionable leadership. Leading the charge is Conor Oberst. To do so, Saddle Creek…
If anyone happened to catch MTV’s Total Request Live last week (whoooo!), then you might have seen Corn Mo, doing what only Corn Mo can. Apparently, on Monday, as Corn Mo (Jon Cunningham to his parents and anyone who doesn’t feel like using his stage name) was bringing home his…
After one listen to N.E.R.D.’s debut, I immediately thought of something Mos Def told Spin awhile back, when the magazine gave him a chance to right the rap-rock wrongs of the past few years. Forget the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of, “Fred Durst so wants…
We would speak today of Edgar Allan Poe’s Man of the Crowd, who so hated himself that he couldn’t stand to be left alone. We would speak of Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, who told his audience the truth about themselves, and was reviled for it. Further: We would speak of…
Slayer isn’t just a band; it’s a precision killing machine. Death is always the hot topic, and they seem to be experts on the subject. Homicide, genocide, suicide. Whatever floats your boat. Slayer kills. Shit is for real. Unless you’re willing to risk life and limb for a rock-and-roll night…
If Wednesday’s The Gloria Record/Her Space Holiday/Ides of Space show at Gypsy Tea Room is proof that indie rock as a sociocultural entity has moved beyond the raw materials of guitars and drums and such to embrace a postmodern sensibility in which artists are inclined to consider their own creative…
When the Breeders formed back in the late ’80s as a side project for then-Pixies bassist Kim Deal and then-Throwing Muses guitarist Tanya Donelly, their supergroup status negated the necessity of playing very many small club gigs. Even when Donelly left the band in 1992 and was replaced by Deal’s…
Where do punk rockers go to die? Or at least to mellow? If the paths of more than a handful of young guys who used to thrash about with guitars and provocative haircuts are any indication, the answer is their inner hard drives. Marc Bianchi, the human behind the computer-love…
Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to have “motherfucker” tattooed on the side of your neck. Don’t even think we have to get the churchgoers out there to back us up on this one. Tattoo? No problem. On your neck? Kinda sketchy. “Motherfucker?” All signs point to no. But that’s…
Listen to enough musicians talk about being musicians, with their anecdotes about shows with a dozen people in the audience and broken-down vans in faraway places and scraping up enough cash to record a few songs, and it won’t be long before you’ve heard them all. Fact is, there aren’t…
Reading Jay McInerney’s Model Behavior last week–basically a gloss on the author’s celebrated 1987 novel Bright Lights, Big City, with some juicy stuff about sexual jealousy and women’s underwear thrown in–I was forced to consider head-on a current pet interest: the recent re-examination of the 1980s as a font of…
If James Hall ever became immensely popular, we’d have to kill him; for now, he’s still our little secret. Obligatory understatement: Here Comes the Trick, the first album by Hall and his band, Pleasure Club, may be the best rock record we’ve heard in years. The new songs are both…
Anthrax. It was always such a cool name. Dunno about most eighth-graders, but I didn’t know much of anything about the chemical agent, only about these guys. They were cool. The name even sounded like “thrash.” And the singer was named Belladonna, like the poisonous plant. And Scott Ian had…
The last time we saw Shawn Francis he was walking around the streets of Austin during South by Southwest wearing a badge around his neck that identified him as “DJ Muppetfucker.” (The badge actually belonged to his friend and fellow DJ Noah Lee, who now goes by the moniker DJ…
Or, this year’s fresh Brit hit (so the NME tells us, anyway), meaning those of us who purchased January’s I Heard Myself in You last February from Amazon’s U.K. site, figuring them as the next Coldplay, can now file it away with the rest of London’s letdowns. Seeing as how…
Recorded in front man Darren Haymen’s bedroom, Dead Media brings hope to all home recorders who believe thousands of dollars spent on recording time in studios can be better spent on self-indulgent and outdated synthesizers. Taking a departure from last year’s brilliant homage to urban romance, We Love the City,…
A week before his show at the Gypsy Tea Room, Nate Fowler said he was finally “ready to get back in the park and play ball,” and many of his fellow players had turned up for his return to the field. Most of them, after all, had suited up with…
Haymarket Riot is a lot like a new restaurant–not the new chain that just moved into the strip mall down the street but more like an upstart hipster greasy spoon, which is exactly what the hard-working Chicago four-piece should start if its members ever change their career path. Right now,…
El Gato will celebrate the release of its first full-length, We’re Birds, on January 18 at the Gypsy Tea Room, with a shindig featuring performances by Hi-Fi Drowning and French Touch. (The disc hit stores January 15.) The group will also toast to its own accomplishment on February 2 at…
It was a strange year, no doubt about it. Think about it: 2001 began with word of the first Toadies release in some seven years. By August, the album was here (March’s Hell Below/Stars Above), but the band wasn’t anymore. At the end of December, word began spreading that the…
For the past few years, we’ve polled the Dallas Observer’s stable of music writers to determine how full of shit the bottom of the barrel was over the past 12 months in an effort to arrive at the 10 most pointless uses of studio time and jewel cases. Below, you’ll…
Best sign that program director Scott Strong and the gents over at Susquehanna Radio Corp. have given up on the station located at 93.3 on your FM dial: 93.3 The Bone Classic Texas Rock that ROCKS. OK, so maybe it’s a little early to declare the new incarnation of the…
