Pleasant Grove and Pinkston will hold a listening party for their respective debut discs on December 8 at The Dark Room. No official release date has been set for either record, but they should both be available (on Last Beat Records) sometime before the end of the month. In other…
SAN ANTONIO — The crowd was so large that about one-third of the estimated 1,000 mourners had to huddle around an underequipped Peavy speaker outside. But even more impressive than the large turnout at the November 23 funeral of Doug Sahm, who succumbed to heart disease five days earlier while…
The Internet is a capitalist’s dream come true: Slap up a virtual storefront, talk someone into giving you a product to sell, then sit back and watch the dollars roll in. Everyone’s getting involved — “dot-com” is almost as ubiquitous as “the” these days — but only a handful manage…
Call the members of Nocturne “industrial.” Call them “hard rock” or “dark wave,” whatever that is. Just don’t call them Goth — not to their faces anyway. Pretty much anything else is fine with the group; they’re not sure what they are yet, but they insist they know what they…
Occasionally when Crash Vinyl performs, the band is joined onstage by a pair of young women in bright-colored wigs and tight leather hot pants. The girls writhe around at the front of the stage, much to the delight of the audience — well, most of it, anyway. They are the…
Dr. Dre Chronic 2001 (Aftermath/Interscope Records) Dr. Dre is still the best hip-hop producer this side of The RZA or Prince Paul and Dan The Automator; he’s among the handful who could almost be called a composer because of his preference for live instrumentation over tried-and-tired Parliament-Funkadelic swipes. And Chronic…
Cary Pierce You Are Here (Aware Records) Cary Pierce is the eternal straight man, taking himself so seriously that his every word and gesture are too good to ignore. You Are Here is an early Christmas present, wrapped in lyrics so unabashedly earnest they make James Taylor sound like John…
Kid Rock When, in the near future, we look back at the state of “alternative music” circa 1999, the big story will most likely be the emergence of (choose one, since all of these “genres” are equally unsatisfying): aggro, rap-rock, or asshole-rock. Still, it really isn’t fair to paint Limp…
If Aimee Mann had sold one album for each word written about her, she’d make Alanis Morissette look like the struggling indie artist she probably ought to be. Nobody gets more press for having done so apparently little: one hit a very long time ago (“Voices Carry,” back when Mann…
Earlier this year, Arlie Carstens was enjoying the kind of life he always dreamed of having when he was growing up in Seattle, spending all of his time snowboarding and listening to Jawbox records. He had just finished recording his debut album with his band Juno, This is the Way…
We live in a time when country music is divided into two nations: the commercial dictatorship of Nashville, and the anarchic republic ineptly named alternative country, Americana, No Depression music — anything but what it always was and still is, which is basically country-rock. And the rule seems to be…
Wes Berggren and his older brother Andy didn’t grow up with many rules and restrictions placed on them. Wes and Andy didn’t really need that kind of discipline, and their parents didn’t believe in it anyway. Don and Joan Berggren let their sons run around naked for the first few…
Beastie Boys The Sounds of Science (Grand Royal/Capitol) For 20 bucks, you can visit beastieboys.com and make your own best-and-rest-of: Pick 40 songs from the available 150 (loads of singles and imports, though not a single one from Licensed to Ill), slap on a title (say, Three Hebrews and One…
Sara Hickman Newborn (Sleeveless) No doubt about it: Getting dropped from Elektra way back when was the best thing that ever happened to Sara Hickman. If ever anyone doubted that signing to a major label can corrupt even the most well-meaning among us, listen only to the album and a…
Late to the Buzzcocks camp, I was the fan who knew of the band’s impact long before I ever heard “Orgasm Addict” and thus the fan who wonders why the band would bother to hijack its way back into ’90s consciousness. The band’s original sound is so pristinely punchy, such…
Joe King — the frontman better known as Joe Queer — has been at it for almost 20 years, and the only thing that’s really changed in that time is the amount of beer he ingests each night (currently leveled off at, uh, none) and who he’s playing with this…
This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. And this is your brain on Bardo Pond. The Philadelphia quintet is touring behind its fourth album, Set and Setting, which, like the band’s name, comes from Timothy Leary’s addled reworking of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in his…
Word is that Centro-matic will head back into the studio in the next few weeks to record songs for its fifth album — a month or so before the band’s fourth disc is even available. Disc No. 4, tentatively titled All the Falsest Hearts Can Try, is due for release…
Shelton Williams was just another face in another crowd, an anonymous punk with safety pins in his clothes — and occasionally, his skin — playing in unknown bands with names like Buzzkill and worse. He was onstage from the time he was 15, yet rarely at the front, usually playing…
Rainer Maria completes about one new song a month. On the surface, this sounds a bit slow, especially considering that the Madison, Wisconsin, trio has relocated to rural Connecticut where their daily chores include feeding dogs, going to the library, and spending a few hours each day just working on…
Archer Prewitt is one of the hardest-working musicians in Chicago’s fertile indie-rock scene. A few years ago, the guitarist-singer-songwriter-comic-book artist moved into the neighborhood with his lounge-jazz outfit, the Coctails, and now he lends his guitar and composition skills to the rock and electronics of Windy City favorites the Sea…
Most record labels are populated with frustrated musicians, people who didn’t have the talent or the guts to stick it out over the long haul. Some just got tired of being screwed over by labels and decided to switch positions. Others never got further than their bedrooms, but they all…
