It hardly seems possible that Radiohead’s latest album, Amnesiac, has managed to confound the masses even more than last year’s Kid A. Touted by the less imaginative as Kid B, the miserable brother of Kid A, Amnesiac has split Radiohead fans into two distinct camps: the faithful obsessives and the…
Julian Casablancas, the 21-year-old man who fronts the hotly tipped New York City band the Strokes, has a knack for distilling his essence down to a line or two in really great songs full of the Velvet Underground’s primeval four-four thud, Television’s wiry guitar chatter and his own gloriously defiant…
Will Ian Svenonius ever stop? The kicking and screaming former instigator of the fight-this-generation youth revolt of Nation of Ulysses felt immediate and pertinent back on 1991’s punk planet. The desperate attitude that the band wore as earnestly as an Oliver North oath and his chic suspicion of adults went…
The cop said he’d been following the van for five miles, maybe more. About five or 10 minutes, he said. The cop was exaggerating. Probably. No, the cop was definitely exaggerating. He wouldn’t wait 10 minutes for the van to pull over. He wouldn’t wait five miles. No cop would…
Don’t be fooled: Mandarin is a real Texas band. Its name is Chinese, and it certainly doesn’t play straight country music or sport 10-gallon hats, but its music sounds just like Texas looks and feels–scorching, expansive, leisurely. Being a Texas band is not about singing with a twang or about…
Like the Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan and the Afghan Wigs’ Greg Dulli, former American Music Club songwriter and vocalist Mark Eitzel has a husky baritone that gels nicely with his literate lyrics of emotional self-evisceration. Tales of drunken abandon and the inevitable laments that follow after liquor’s cloudy veil evaporates…
“I’m going to be playing with the Ed Soph Trio down there,” saxophonist Joe Lovano says from New York of his upcoming performance at the Dallas Museum of Art. “I haven’t done that in a long time, go somewhere and play with some local guys. But I’ve known Ed for…
At this rate, the only thing Epic Records hasn’t released bearing Stevie Ray Vaughan’s name on the spine is a double-disc collection of his entire funeral–with a limited edition third disc featuring the sound of the grave diggers pitching dirt atop his casket. After all, you would have thought that…
As it turns out, Tricky’s been making records even he hates–contract-killers, he might call them, if not audience-killers in the process. (Everything since 1995’s Maxinquaye has been one “fuck-off” record after another, he explains, as in: “Fuck off, I’m not giving people what they want,” he offers in his new…
Milton Mapes’ front man Greg Vanderpool and head Deadman Steven Collins shared band and stage for nearly seven years; they did their time as Plebeians, recording two discs for Carpe Diem, till parting ways three years back…or, around the time they swapped out their U2 collection for a few copies…
Even Todd Deatherage isn’t sure how long it’s been. Two years, maybe three. You don’t keep track of these things when they’re happening to you. Promises and projects come and go like an old man’s memory, and years go by. These things happen, and if you’re smart, you don’t pay…
Were there any justice in pop culture, turn-of-the-century French artists, writers, musicians and poets would be able to return from their graves and proclaim, “Apportez-moi la tête du Baz Luhrmann!” The Australian director’s kitchen-sink musical Moulin Rouge takes more than a little liberty with its subject matter, turning a time…
What happens on December 21, 2012, has–according to the Mayan Calendar–taken a 5,125-year cycle to recur. On that date, a very rare conjunction of the sun with the ecliptic of the Milky Way galaxy happens. (Basically, it’s the coincidence of the winter solstice and the heliacal rising of the galactic…
For a bunch of trash talkers, the five thuggish, ruggish Scotchmen in Mogwai sure do make a heavenly racket. Rock Action, their new album, is the sound of post-rock quietly (and sometimes loudly) exploding, an enormous emerald-green cloud billowing out into the night sky and slowly obscuring everything you can…
That Bill Callahan’s musical pseudonym comes from an opaque cloud of carcinogenic pollution stirred up by the luxuries of modern living tells you what sort of mental state this no-fi nonconformist wallowed in when he started his one-man act back in the late 1980s. Smog’s early cassette releases and Drag…
When New Orleans dirty south B-Boy Mystikal left Master P’s No Limit franchise and returned to Britney and boy-band bopping Jive’s world domination pop machine with 1999’s Ghetto Fabulous, certain critical habitués expressed reservations. Skeptics felt it was the case of a young artist making a play for the show…
Even though the power-tool bludgeoning of Jim G. Thirlwell’s music may have some contemporary cohorts, it’s his peculiar brand of lyrical ranting that sets the now NYC-based Thirlwell (better known as Foetus, and all of its various permutations) in a world entirely his own. Imagine a crack-powered Eric Bogosian gargling…
Guy Berryman has just returned from Thailand, where he’s been on holiday for the past few weeks. That is where you go when you’ve seen almost all there is to see, when you’re in a band that has taken you to Italy, France, Spain, Australia, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Japan, North…
Neil Michael Hagerty has made a long and contentious career out of doing exactly as he pleases. His stint with Pussy Galore opposite Jon Spencer led to some truly chaotic moments both onstage and off, while his long-standing gig with Jennifer Herrema as Royal Trux evolved from a guerrilla noise-pop…
The Alkaline Trio is Blink-182 with the Promise Ring’s guilty conscience, the kind of guys who’ll break your heart before breaking the bottle, the kid next door who leaves flaming shit on your porch but makes mulch in the morning. So perhaps it’s no surprise that From Here to Infirmary,…
Before 1999, the riddle “What is the sound of young punks making new wave?” lay somewhere on the unspeakable scale between “Does anyone really think Julia Roberts can act?” and “Will Nader actually run for president?” The proof proved to be not as insincere as the latter nor as impious…
You ever score a sweet pair of shoes at a garage sale long after you thought everyone had already scored all the stuff worth scoring? Then you know what it’s like to discover Powderfinger and Ours. Both acts are emerging from completely different backgrounds–Powderfinger is Australia’s biggest rock band, finally…
