Earlier this year, a group of electronic musicians in Denton staged a coup of Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios’ open-mike nights, arriving early and commandeering the sign-up sheet each time out, turning the open-mike nights into their own open forum. Soon enough, the group, collectively known as Stereo on Strike, was…
Quite the impressive lineup: Sting, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Joe Strummer, Mark Knopfler, Dr. John, Eric Clapton, Paul Weller, David Gilmour and nearly a dozen more A-listers, not to mention scores of studio hounds, join the former Squeeze keyboardist and current Brit-TV music-show host on 22 new and slightly used…
Like the Repeater/Steady Diet of Nothing days of Operation Desert Storm, Fugazi is still keenly aware of the injustices in the world and suspicious of the bigwigs with the big bucks, suspicious of where their loyalties lie. It’s even in the band’s name–Vietnam slang for “a fucked-up situation.” Appropriate timing,…
For all the progress they’ve made toward introducing “out” sounds to “in” audiences, what I like most about the bands typically clumped into the “post-rock” scene (the phrase doesn’t really bother me all that much, but I’ll go ahead and use the quotation marks so you don’t think I’m lame)…
A couple of weeks ago (Scene, Heard, November 22) we told you about the recent closing of Dan’s Bar in Denton and what the loss of the venue meant to the city’s music scene. Specifically, we said that with one fewer outlet for Denton bands and musicians, the city was…
In Greek mythology, the Muses were gods and goddesses who were so proficient in the arts and sciences that they would inspire followers to glory by their mere presence. In the modern lexicon, the word “muse” refers to a simple source of inspiration, connoting a creative force that lies beyond…
There’s a game common at arcades called Whack-A-Mole, where plastic rodents pop up briefly from holes in the playing surface. You know the game–you get points for smacking the moles before they drop again. That’s an apt metaphor for the record industry’s current attempts to “whack” a legion of companies…
Raul Malo’s a nice guy–a real charmer, actually, the kind who bounds into a room and gives you a hearty-ass handshake, asks how you’re doing and then waits to hear the answer–so I’m not really that surprised that he’s not taking the chance I’m giving him to trash Nashville. As…
In other words, “Show up and play, or you’re off the playlist.” One of those annual you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-give-you-a-reach-around affairs, KISS-FM’s holiday shindig serves up a heapin’ helpin’ of ho-ho-hum; nothing says, “Happy Holidays, suckers!” like a serenade from LFO (pronounced ’round my house as, “Hell if I know”) and Natural (a…
I don’t envy those on the frontlines of the neo-soul revolution. Sure, there are perks: fame, fortune, a permanent spot on MTV2, the chance to hang out virtually every day with Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson of the Roots. But think of the demands: On the right you’ve got the neo-traditionalists, those…
To basically everyone who heard it, Shelby Lynne earned the right to call her breakthrough album I Am Shelby Lynne–no matter that it was her sixth full-length and the one to win her the Best New Artist Grammy. The record’s flaxen weave of brutal country confession and elegant soul reserve–essentially,…
Who the fuck is Nikki Sudden? And why would a small indie label in Bloomington, Indiana, nearly go bankrupt reissuing 10 of his albums from the ’80s that never sold well in the first place? Unless you’re eternally tuned to your local college radio station, you probably don’t know that…
Regina Chellew is sitting in Tami Thomsen’s office at Last Beat Records on Commerce Street, talking about her new album. It is her solo debut, released under the name Chao, and, for the most part, it is a true solo effort, with Chellew recording almost every note on the disc…
For some reason, the first time I listened to Macavity’s debut EP, Falling Hard in the Key of E, I imagined a world ruled by 13-year-old super-geniuses who worshipped Macavity in between updating the theory of relativity and repainting everything in sight in glittery pinks and purples. That said, this…
Trying to cajole dissipating old farts into retirement is as tired a chore as they are; rockers, like athletes and whores, know not when to play their final encore, deaf as they are from years of prolonged applause. So let them play on and on and on and on; there’s…
Ah, the punk-turned-acoustic balladeer. It seems to be a common affliction–those angry rockers who suddenly unplug their electric guitars to become sensitive singer-songwriters. I suppose you can trace it back to Billy Bragg, through Bob Mould in his post-Hüsker Dü days and via Nirvana’s Unplugged album, right up to the…
The greater Dallas-Fort Worth area is quite a haul from Providence, Rhode Island, but on Friday and Saturday night this weekend, you’d be forgiven if you forgot that for a while, so admirably do the two bands headlining Rubber Gloves reimagine Rhode Island School of Design alumni the Talking Heads’…
The protocol for a so-called post-rock show like this one almost demands that the crowd avoid any overt or spontaneous signs of enjoyment while the music is playing. Between bursts of song-ending applause, audience members should stand still, ineptly imitating mannequins in the window of a Salvation Army thrift shop,…
It’s too early to tell what effect, if any, the recent North Texas New Music Festival will have on the fortunes of local bands, but it’s already safe to say at least one thing: It definitely succeeded in putting asses in seats. So to speak. There wasn’t a single club…
You’ve heard the story so often, it may as well have happened to you. And maybe it did. Young band, barely out of high school, gets signed to a major-label recording contract. Releases a pair of solid albums–adventurous by major-label standards, good-to-great by anyone’s–yet is ignored almost from the moment…
It’s the same thing all over again for Sonic Boom, who has made a career out of repeating himself. He’s back from the far-reaching cosmos of Experimental Audio Research to once again plumb the depths of the eternal song, with guitar in tow, as he did in the great Spacemen…
Smart and smirky art project (The Worst!, an Ed Wood concept “musical”) and risky-frisky Social Statement (Blacks ‘n’ Jews, “marching together two by two”) now out of the way, Josh Alan Friedman gets back to playing lissome, smart-ass Hebrew guitar-slinger making with the strip-club soundtrack circa Jack Ruby and the…
