To your average rock-and-roll fan there is no discernible difference between the Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync–or any other teen-pop outfit for that matter. They’re all a bunch of skinny, middle-class white kids–even though a few have ethnic-sounding names–who shake their lithe and limber bodies to canned synth-pop while singing…
Ever seen a lanky man walk onstage wearing nothing but a pair of corduroy jeans, a battered straw cowboy hat, boots, the lines of a bra on his chest and a handlebar mustache over his lip crudely scrawled in Magic Marker? If you ever caught the Cows during their most…
A snare-cymbal clash fades in to join two guitars–one a simple bass line, the other a recognizable tone of warm distortion sparked by awkwardly picked chords. Over it, an unfamiliar voice breathes some familiarly elliptical lyrics: “Tortured statues someone once held up to the sky/The silver trees and weathervanes mark…
By all counts, Björk albums should be commercial disasters. Her lyrics make little sense to the outside world, and she’s known to invite listeners into the depths of her mind. (She also doesn’t care one bit about the repercussions of dressing like a swan, but that’s beside the point.) On…
The rumors have been floating around since late July, but now they can be confirmed: The Toadies have broken up. Singer-guitarist Todd Lewis called the Dallas Observer late Wednesday afternoon to deliver the official word, saying the decision was made on the bands last tour, when bassist Lisa Umbarger told…
Eleven Hundred Springs doesn’t look like your average country band. Obviously. Clearly. They’ve all spent plenty of time in tattoo parlors, and not just for the pleasant conversation. A couple of them have long hair. In a rock club, they’d blend in; they’d be camouflaged. But they’re five sore thumbs…
Andrew Kenny has a problem, and he isn’t ashamed to admit it: He likes long songs. Songs so long they seem to have no end. Songs so long they bleed onto other bands’ records. “Once we got something that we liked,” says the singer, guitarist and principal songwriter in the…
Townes Van Zandt died January 1, 1997, his heart betraying him as he lay in the Tennessee night recovering from back surgery. Only the romantic and the fool would suggest that’s when the man would have wanted to go, but maybe it was appropriate: He was spared the pain of…
Like George W. Bush, the Los Angeles-by-way-of-San Francisco band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club can’t give it to you straight but looks perplexed by efforts to be savvy. Named for Brando’s gang in The Wild One, this trio echoes Dubya’s political protocol that dresses up Reagan and Big Daddy’s ideas and…
It’s not so much that longevity gets a bad rap these days as much as it is people seem to have forgotten what it means, much like social drinking and casual sex. It still happens, sure, but it’s pushed to the background and kept hush-hush. In entertainment it’s even worse…
Stake a place near the front of the stage at the Gypsy Tea Room tonight to see a guy trying hard to define himself playing music that works against that. A self-styled Paul Westerberg type, young media darling Pete Yorn’s debut album, musicforthemorningafter (cute, huh?), presents a ruggedly handsome guy…
Ever seen a lanky man walk onstage wearing nothing but a pair of corduroy jeans, a battered straw cowboy hat, boots, the lines of a bra on his chest and a handlebar mustache over his lip crudely scrawled in Magic Marker? If you ever caught the Cows during their most…
The more Todd Deatherage flew to New York to play shows with his buddy Rhett Miller, the more it was obvious that he’d eventually stop flying back. And when he came back after his most recent NYC jaunt, a trip that included sharing a bill with the bicoastal Miller at…
Since it first started in 1993, Quasi has made a career out of wedding catchy, up-tempo pop music to some of the gloomiest lyrics around. Its new album, The Sword of God–and first for the Touch & Go label–is no exception. Songwriter/keyboardist Sam Coomes and his ex-wife, drummer Janet Weiss,…
On May 25, 2001, there stood on a single London stage Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon–all told, “a fucking gorgeous bunch of blokes,” in the estimation of one Peter Townshend, who’s known his share of rough boys. Their names rang a bell. They looked familiar, if…
Make no mistake about it; Germans know something we don’t. Fans of art-damaged pastiche spit out by German-launched oddities such as Stereo Total, Chicks on Speed, Go Plus and the Notwist know this for a fact. The few American unbelievers were slapped silly when Mouse on Mars came stateside earlier…
The fervid fever that spawned and defined American Punk was as much a personal response to the blasé culture of the early 1980s as it was a middle finger to late-’70s music. You know the usual suspects: Reagan and his cronies, disco, Frampton Comes Alive. It’s as cliché as a…
Question: Why do we have to pick on a band from around here that’s actually doing good things? Answer: Because, obviously, it doesn’t matter what we say. Not in Drowning Pool’s case anyway. (The question, by the way, was posed by a publicist for the band’s label, Wind-Up Records.) The…
Irv Karwelis, Idol Records’ honcho, sent over the Onward Quirky Soldiers advance along with sale figures for the first single off said disc, Chomsky’s sophomore effort that rocks like a senior on the last day of high school. Turns out the three-song disc, fleshed out by skeletal demos, is moving…
Through a sparse guitar line and viola-and-drum interlude breaks a world-weary voice that intones, “I can’t go back to my favorite bar, ’cause now I’m sure that there’s some lessons that I’m never gonna learn.” In “Back to School,” the second song on Thalia Zedek’s debut solo album, Been Here…
Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote, “Earth’s crammed with heaven,” and if you believe Will Johnson, most of it is crammed into Mississippi. To him, you can see heaven driving north on Highway 61, on the way to Clarksdale, or when you’re sitting on the banks of the Yazoo River,…
It’s a good thing the folks who handle Will Oldham–the songwriting savant known as Bonnie Prince Billy and Palace and Palace Songs and Palace Brothers and The Palace Drawbridge Is Closing Let’s Storm the Castle (OK, just kidding about that one)–are on the ball about providing a copy of his…
