Lake Highland resident Annie Benjamin is hard to miss. With her fiery red hair and tirelessly animated personality, Benjamin has been a fixture of the local music scene for more than two decades, writing and performing her brand of urban folk while championing a variety of causes. Some Kind of…
Dear Gods of Rock: It’s me, The Mullet. Please kill me. My time on this earth—hanging off Richard Marx’s head as it sang “Don’t Mean Nothin’,” going to Indigo Girls shows and bathing in NASCAR exhaust fumes—has been fun, but I just can’t take being the style that springs and…
Leave it to Trent Reznor—a musician who probably doesn’t even need to hype his art at this point—to trump every other viral marketer with the Internet-heavy promotional campaign for Year Zero. (It’s a concept record; think the Big Brother mentality of George Orwell’s 1984 combined with the drugged-out society of…
Ah, it seems like yesterday these English lads were the toast of the town, the leaders of the hype pack. Oh, wait. It pretty much was just yesterday. Over the last year, we’ve learned that the Arctic Monkeys are brats: arrogant onstage, snotty in interviews and whiney on record. Of…
Waking Ashland’s frontman and keyboardist Jonathan Jones says he wants to combine the emotion of piano-based singer-songwriters such as Elton John and Billy Joel with the edginess of The Pixies, all without sounding like any of the three. He generally succeeds. Waking Ashland is often called piano rock, and for…
Kazu Makino has a voice so shiny and cold, you can almost hear the titanium in her face. The Kyoto-born singer of Blonde Redhead—the New York art-rock trio composed of Makino and Milanese twins Amedeo and Simone Pace—was severely injured in a 2002 riding accident. She was thrown to the…
Dallas loves it some lady bloggers. And the ladies show their love back, especially this week, when not one but two estrogen-generated events will be foisted upon the masses by two of our fair burg’s favorites—namely Kittenpants (aka Darci Ratliff, who has expanded beyond the digital realm into that of,…
When Elvis Perkins takes the stage, ladies swoon. He bears a scruffy resemblance to his father, Psycho star Anthony Perkins, but his songs of alienation, heartbreak and emotional mending conjure up the poetic lyrics of Leonard Cohen. Elvis’ personal burden is public record; dad died of AIDS in ’92, and…
When the Smithereens debuted in 1980, they actually had to refute criticism that they sounded too much like the Beatles. Such dated lunacy makes it especially ironic that a quarter-century later the band would release Meet the Smithereens, a song-for-song re-creation of Meet the Beatles. Frontman Pat DiNizio has always…
If you saw the potent and distressing documentary Before the Music Dies, you had the opportunity, aside from a concert venue, to see why Erykah Badu is so special. Badu’s critique of the current climate in popular music and her hilarious (but dead-on) list of exactly what physical attributes are…
Modern rock is plagued by many problems, and two of them revolve around the issue of earnestness. Often musicians suffer from one of two sides of the same problem: Either they, in all their “coolness” and allegiance to all that is affected, worship at the altar of irony with such…
European sensation Hot Chip started making music because the bandmates were bored with everything new and just couldn’t get over their old favorites. “We loved Phil Spector and the Beach Boys, Kraftwerk and Robert Wyatt, Timbaland and Madlib, Brian Eno and Devo, Anti-Pop Consortium and Aphex Twin, Will Oldham and…
Like their crescendo-loving peers in Explosions in the Sky, Japanese post-rockers Mono lay down soundtracks for the Oscar-worthy epics in your head. Formed in 2000 as a pet project for experimental guitarist Takaakira Goto, Mono soon evolved into an instrumental quartet consisting of the basics—y’know: guitar, bass and drums. The…
Sanjaya, gone from American Idol! Alas, I barely knew him. Our time together was but brief, comprised of stolen moments on YouTube and furtive glances at celebrity gossip blogs. And though now the Indian warbler is forever gone from the Idol ranks, he will always be in my heart. For…
It just doesn’t get much more country than one witness’ account of the Billy Joe Shaver shooting, which took place a couple of weeks ago near Papa Joe’s Saloon just outside of Waco. Several witnesses say that Shaver and his victim—Billy Coker—had been chatting amiably until talk turned to Shaver’s…
Along with like-minded contemporaries Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Minnesota’s Tapes ‘n Tapes has come to epitomize the power of digital media in the new millennium. Thanks to the band’s instantly memorable and magnetic blend of Pixies post-punk and Slanted and Enchanted-era Pavement, along with a handful of choice reviews,…
What the hell is a Limbeck? Short answer: He’s a member of Limbeck, a So-Cal cocktail of Jayhawks roots rock and Shins dream-pop that more often than not gets called alt-country. The long answer: Many moons ago, the Bastards of Limbeck were a teen pop-punk band named after Charles in…
CINEMATIC MASTERWORK Adam Sandler’s profoundly disturbing resemblance to Bob Dylan in Reign Over Me. Though it is fun to imagine Bob singing, “It’s cool to pee yo’ pants.” SOCIETAL CONUNDRUMS Wondering why anyone would knowingly watch a video clip of Karl Rove rapping. Have some respect for yourself. TECHNOLOGICAL MARVELS…
Based on the uncharacteristically lively Woke on a Whaleheart, the latest album by Bill Callahan (aka Smog), it seems dating fellow Drag City artist Joanna Newsom has worked out exceedingly well for the enigmatic singer-songwriter. The union has also succeeded splendidly for fans, as the album easily ranks among Callahan’s…
Those who think that pop-music junkies represent music fandom’s lowest common denominator should read the comments left on iTunes about Avril Lavigne’s cheerleader-chant-from-hell single, “Girlfriend.” Namely, this astute one: “The avril i looked up to was her own person, and proud of it. She wasn’t afraid to act like herself,…
For Amon Tobin’s Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3 Soundtrack, the Brazilian-born U.K. resident and producer/DJ spun delicately assembled cinematic instrumentals into epic nightmarish videogame backdrops, boasting chopped organ and string section bits over boisterous drum breaks. It was another impressive exercise in Tobin’s venturesome sound manipulation, but Foley Room presented…
Paul Wall is a snuggly, goofy shortstack who’s probably really into pizza and playing that airplane game with his son. He has a squinty pug face and is ugly-sexy in a teddy bear/goblin way, which he wouldn’t be if he were a Home Depot cashier instead of the unlikely king…
