Morphine The Night (Rykodisc/DreamWorks Records) Believe this: The fact that Morphine singer-bassist Mark Sandman suffered a fatal heart attack on stage last summer in Italy is as important to any review of The Night as the 11 songs on the album. You can’t libel the dead, but just try finding…
Korn I made it all the way through Korn’s Issues just once, and even then, I was out of the room for most of it; turns out that’s the best way to listen to Korn, from such a distance that you can’t actually hear it. A few weeks later, I…
Guy Clark As time passes and his peers such as Townes Van Zandt pass away, Guy Clark seems more like a sage than like a poet laureate. His voice is the sound of whiskey mixed with cigarette smoke, a pungent concoction with an afterburn that reminds you how some of…
The Handsome Family Unlike the Ramones or even Darlington, the Handsome Family are actually a family. The husband-and-wife duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks together write sinister, haunting country songs — more Appalachia than Nashville, more Edgar Allan Poe than cheatin’ heart/tears in my beer tales. Though the band is…
Washington, D.C.’s fertile music scene has developed such a reputation for high-quality output (by the likes of Unrest, Fugazi, Lungfish, and Trans Am, to name but a few) that every band from the city benefits from guilt by association. And no band seems to be quite as guilty as the…
Despite recent claims that no one respects us because we print hearsay and gossip, as far as we know the Smashing Pumpkins will indeed be appearing at Tower Records on Saturday to sign a few autographs. It doesn’t look as if Billy Corgan and crew will perform though, and if…
Travis Morrison should be at work right now, drinking bad coffee and building Web sites for the Consumer Electronics Association. But he’s not — he wasn’t there at 2 p.m., and almost an hour later, there still isn’t any sign of him. A few phone calls and a few more…
Unless you’re a local punk enthusiast who perhaps spent some time studying the collective works of Rudolf Rocker and his “anarcho-syndicalism” posse, you most likely have not heard, nor heard of, Chad Ferman. Yet he has done plenty to keep his fragile flame burning around here. Perhaps a handful of…
Yes, Bernard Butler was once the guitarist for Brit-pop phenomenon Suede. But he’s quick to point out that his quantity of post-Suede work is now larger than his output as a member. For Butler it’s an irritating association, like constantly being reminded of who you were in high school. He…
For a moment, it almost seems as though you’ve walked into the CD World location on Greenville Avenue and Mockingbird Lane by mistake. There’s the burly, bearded Chris Penn behind the counter ringing up a customer, and Carlos Jackson, a quiet Elephant 6 collective afficionado, checking the racks. Both were…
Boss Hog White Out (In the Red Records) Mr. and Mrs. Jon Spencer turn in their pop sellout to Geffen, only to find the label merged and their band dropped. So much for getting the corporation to subsidize the transition out of the cult’s comfy basement into the family room…
Amy Crenshaw and the Crosstown Boys Amy Crenshaw and the Crosstown Boys (Self-released) No one’s going to confuse Amy Crenshaw with Wanda Jackson (c. 1955) or Patsy Cline (c. “Sweet Dreams”), if only because the former’s living in Oklahoma when she’s not touring the Christian rockabilly circuit in Sweden and…
When There’s Something About Mary opened in July 1998, there was some speculation that Jonathan Richman was finally going to become a rock star and get the credit he’d been earning since his 1972 debut with his Boston band the Modern Lovers. So far, his two dozen-plus albums (with the…
In case you didn’t know it, Judah Bauer — otherwise known as the other guitar player in the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion — has a band on the side. It doesn’t seem to be common knowledge, since at least three pals, music-trivia know-it-alls, all said pretty much the same thing…
Good/Bad Art Collective hosts its first benefit concert of 2000 on February 4 at Dan’s Bar in Denton; from what we understand, it will involve a beauty pageant consisting of members of the four participating bands: Budapest One, Baptist Generals, Little Grizzly, and Asphalt the Recorder. The show begins at…
As we’ve mentioned before, most things involving the music business are subject to change up to the point when they actually happen, and even then, you can’t always be sure. There is perhaps no better example of this than the annual South by Southwest Music Festival, which happens this year…
Sixty people — primarily white twentysomethings with goatees and dreadlocks — crowd into a small storefront in the Western Addition area of San Francisco. Musicians carrying saxophone cases and drumsticks slip through the crowd up to the front. It’s immediately apparent that this is not your ordinary Sunday church service…
Even though it’s plainer than the nose on a face, the point that sometimes gets obscured in folk music is it’s music for folks, for the people. Now that doesn’t automatically make Ricky Martin a folkie because he sells shiploads of CDs, concert tickets, T-shirts, and teen magazines to the…
In Dallas, listening to electronic music usually means sitting at home with the headphones, shaking your ass in the privacy of your own bedroom. (Translation: not much fun and sort of pathetic.) The dance clubs where most DJs perform are places where the music comes in a distant third behind…
Pan-American 360 Business/360 Bypass (Kranky Records) Welcome aboard flight 360 Business/360 Bypass, the second full-length, low-pulse release from Pan-American, also known as Mark Nelson. This six-song, hour-long collection of songs is a rhythmic trip with traces of everything from bossa nova to dub bass to downtempo beats to warm synths…
The Limes Smile (Deluxe Records) There isn’t much about The Limes’ debut that stands out on the first listen — not one song you have to hear again right away before you can go any further, a roadblock with a chorus that sticks in your head like a round from…
The Pretenders Back in the heyday of new wave, band names were often dipped in irony, like The Pretenders. But now, some two decades later, The Pretenders have proved themselves anything but false icons. For at a time when so much rock seems forced and/or faked, The Pretenders are one…
