If there is such a genre as ambient Americana, then Tom Freund is its standard bearer. First gaining attention as a touring member of pioneering roots rockers the Silos, Freund has parlayed a decade-long friendship with Ben Harper into a series of atmospherically rustic releases that culminated in 2004’s Copper…
I’m beginning to think every band in Dallas should be a tribute band. It’s not that we don’t have our fair share of delightful groups, to be sure, but at last weekend’s Double Wide Halloween tribute show everyone seemed to be having such a damn fine time—so many fists pumping…
Oklahoma-born, occasionally Texan (he’s spent some years in the Lone Star State), songwriter Jimmy Webb has a history as a musician’s dream. Webb wrote some of the great classics of the modern era—”Up, Up and Away,” “Galveston” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”—deceptively poppy hits that actually comprise…
The subculture of tribute bands is a dark and mysterious one. It seems that lurking beneath the surface of every local music scene is an undercover army of musicians who, for whatever reason, spend their time honing their craft, toiling away for hours upon end to become living extensions of…
The following events have been irresponsibly fictionalized for dramatic effect. However, the names have not been changed. The Dallas Banjo Band claims to have formed back in 1989, and you’d be hard pressed to find any history on them prior to that. At first, it would appear as though this…
Les Claypool has always understood that without a good dose of humor, instrumental virtuosity can produce music as empty as Eddie Van Halen’s noggin. As leader of Primus, Claypool successfully melded his overpowering bass-guitar skills with a keenly sly wit and thrilled an unlikely demographic of air-guitar-playing frat boys and…
This doesn’t sound like a Willie Nelson record, and it doesn’t sound like a Ryan Adams record; dunno what it sounds like, to be honest, save for some show-offy mash-up that does less to pump up Shotgun Willie than shoot his legs out from under him. Not that pairing Nelson…
Wherein Tom Waits cleans out the closet, holds a garage sale and finds the crowd begging for more, more, more. Hence the 26 soundtrack-compilation-etc. familiars and 30 “new” songs that sound like all the old ones, spread over three discs that glibly and ably summarize the career thus far: “Brawlers”…
I’d probably exceed my allotted word count just roll calling all the A-list amigos that appear on Hi-Tek’s latest release. Established hip-hop statesmen like Q-Tip, Nas, Talib Kweli, Common, Ghostface Killah and Raekwon (among many others) drop solid contributions on top of a neck-snapping, toe-tapping canvas of orchestral loops, bleating…
Because he recorded for countless labels over the course of seven decades, John Lee Hooker’s hugely influential brand of blues and boogie has never been successfully anthologized until now. This four-disc set clocks in at more than four hours and features 85 examples of Hooker’s distinctive brilliance. It’s a massive…
Gerard Way offers his critics plenty to ridicule on the latest Romance CD, including unbridled theatricality, more classic-rock nods than even Lenny Kravitz typically offers and the sort of show-biz shamelessness that hipsters consider terminally uncool. Yet the garish over-the-topness of the entire twisted enterprise is precisely why this disc…
For more than a decade, Damien Jurado has flown under the radar as this generation’s Nick Drake. Jurado has a hushed, fragile vocal that’s a pleasant complement to his minimal instrumentation. But what sets him apart from his deceased ’70s counterpart is how well he crafts a string of despairing…
Good metal is hard to come by these days. For a while, the fallout from the late-’90s rap-rock explosion threatened to undo forever all that is good and metal in the universe. Luckily, new blood continues to flow. Orlando’s Trivium unleashes faithful metal epics that channel late-’80s Anthrax and Cliff…
The lovely ladies over at FineLineLive.com continue their maternal resuscitation of the local scene as they proudly present Club DaDa’s Featured Artist of the Month, Rahim Quazi. Mr. Quazi’s first record was an exercise in melodic indie melancholy occasionally garnished with flutes and strings and such. He’s now at the…
Sometimes it’s more the “songwriter” than the “singer” in “singer-songwriter” that really transforms a gal with a six-string into a triumph. Athens, Georgia’s Madeline sings with the perfectly imperfect, heartbreakingly restrained power of Jolie Holland, but it’s the songs around which her voice is wrapped that pull the listener into…
Part MTV Unplugged and part VH1 Divas (which we suppose would add up to be an installment of VH1 Storytellers), Saturday night’s Flying Solo show at The Cavern features four local frontmen strippin’ it down and kickin’ it acoustic, though they’ll have to get by without a little help from…
Riding high on the crest of new single “Everybody Is Easy,” Dallas’ all-star cast of musical veterans drops a new disc, Mercy, an oddly named piece of work, as the disc shows none. It is a full-on, unapologetic sonic throwback, full of rock riffs and distort-o gee-tars and, of course,…
It might be going a bit far to place Social Distortion alongside the ’80s underground legends who have been so revered of late, but there are mobs out there who would go toe-to-toe with you on that. You know the story: Wasted-years L.A. punks ride the drug train off the…
Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, better known by his stage name, Taj Mahal, is less a traditional blues artist and more a cross-cultural musicologist who just happens to play some damn fine blues guitar. Over the course of four decades, Mahal has perfected his unique melding of blues, reggae, Cajun, gospel,…
Joey Beltram highlights an all-star lineup at the
Meltdown Block Party on Saturday, October 28 at Lizard
Lounge and Club Seven.
Our Band Could Be Your Band takes place Saturday,
October 28 at Dan’s Silverleaf in Denton. Doors open at 6
p.m., and music starts at 8 p.m. Admission is $7.|2006
may be the New Day Rising that Hsker D sang about, but
a more fitting epithet for the Our Band Could Be Your
Band event might be, as the Replacements once said,
“You be me for a while, and I’ll be you.” Here’s the
lowdown on who is whom:
Chin Up Chin Up performs with Oxford Collapse on
Thursday, October 26 at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studio
in Denton.
