When Comet broke up in 1997, the local scene moved on. The band’s spacey, shoegazer rock, part of a mid-’90s Dallas movement that included bands like Mazinga Phaser, was all but forgotten by the aughts, and members moved on to other projects, most notably drummer Josh Garza’s Secret Machines. Last…
Back in the day, people (read: music critics) used to compare every U.K. band trying to make a go of it in the United States to Radiohead, usually to diminish the efforts of the band in question. As in: “Radiohead-lite.” Travis might as well have changed its name to that…
In the solo work she’s released since the casual dissolution of the Moldy Peaches, the New York anti-folk duo she shared with singer-songwriter Adam Green, Kimya Dawson has concentrated on teasing out the emotional profundities that were sometimes hard to hear in the Peaches’ ragged, profane little ditties. On Hidden…
If amusement parks in the future ever build tributes to the 20th century, you can bet your futuristic dollar that The Crystal Method will run the ’90s booth. Five years into the 21st century, the duo (Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland) still mixes big-beat tracks that sound like rip-offs from…
Luckily for Dallas, the traveling road show of mediocrity known as the Jägermeister Music Tour–currently featuring post-Creed modern rockers Alter Bridge–has this year been folded into KDGE’s annual alt-rock celebration. How else could one metropolitan area have handled so much rock on one night? So if you’re good and consume…
Time has all but erased them. Even those who know of them know little about them–where they came from, how they met, what they were like. They came to Dallas from the Midwest in the late 1950s to set up shop in a club that was shuttered long ago and…
On Wednesday, Ashlee Simpson’s Autobiography tour ends in Dallas and, coincidentally, so will her career. For many Americans, the end will be welcome. But for the thousands of people gullible enough to fall for her (including me), the farewell is bittersweet. Let me explain. According to common wisdom, Ashlee’s career…
Even the name of the place speaks of another generation–Bill’s Records. I mean: What’s a record, Mommy? And though owner and namesake Bill Wisener’s famously cluttered store on Spring Valley Road once typified the record-clerk culture of the ’80s and ’90s, captured in films like High Fidelity (which Bill has…
Fire marshals were the surprise guests at last Friday night’s Gypsy Tea Room show, a Ronald McDonald House fundraiser. Their appearance started rumors that the centerpiece Deep Ellum club was delinquent in its payments to the fire marshal. “Not that I’m aware of,” said Whit Meyers of The EC, which…
Fiona Apple’s unreleased third album is all over the Net now, liberated by copyright non-believers for whom no safe is strong enough. Some posting the music to their blogs are conflicted: They satisfy their craving for Apple’s music, knowing she’ll see not one penny, but they justify their deeds as…
Hummingbirds in Flight sounds like what might happen if the odd, androgynous Hedwig fronted the band at Trail Dust Steak House. Sure, a distinctive voice can be an asset, but Rosh’s distracting vibrato and affected pronunciation (presumably from his time as an aspiring opera singer) overshadow any positives. The album’s…
It’s awful early into 2005 to claim a year’s best country effort, but Little Rock, from Houston native Hayes Carll, hearkens back to a time when country was honest, simple and tough. “I don’t care if it’s backwoods country, and I don’t care if it’s rock and roll,” Carll sings…
In lieu of new text, here instead is a compilation of things I’ve written about Richard Thompson over the past decade–something every rock critic could do, since we write about Richard Thompson as often as we use the word “the.” This is Thompson’s stock in trade–the crafty and bitter pop…
Bay Area-based MC Lyrics Born has one of underground hip-hop’s most playful, distinctive voices: a deep, resonant rumble full of little cracks and hoarse spots, able to swing from nimble syllable-stepping to a laid-back drawl. This helps on a remix record like Same !@#$ Different Day, LB’s loose reimagining of…
My boyfriend has a line about seeing Tori Amos live: “Every man in the audience wanted to be her piano bench that night.” Now, considering her gay male fanbase, I sort of doubt that. But there’s no denying that in concert, Tori Amos can appear to be a sexual she-beast…
Phillips used to front Toad the Wet Sprocket–or Toad and the Wet Sprockets, as people familiar only with the Santa Barbara pop-rockers’ jangly 1991 hit “Walk on the Ocean” remember them. On his new solo disc, Winter Pays for Summer, Phillips remodels himself as a good-natured roots-pop troubadour, singing mildly…
Micah P. Hinson’s debut album is full of lovely, haunting sounds you’d expect from a band of ghosts. After all, the Abilene singer-songwriter overcame drug addiction, poverty and homelessness while writing The Gospel of Progress, and the 13 songs, full of sadness and reflection, sound like he really did walk…
Once upon a time, Denton made a name for itself with festivals like this. Unbelievably, it’s now been nearly a decade since the first Melodica festival created the phrase “Denton space rock,” but the spirit lives on, and so does the sound of swirling, cascading guitars and slow-churning, subversive melodies…
It’s Saturday night, and I’m on a date with my mother. She drags me onto the empty dance floor and imitates the dance sequence from Pulp Fiction. Even without a crowd, I feel embarrassed. My mom is pretty typical: sweet, compassionate and quiet. But when she hits the town, the…
“Was I supposed to wear white socks?” Shane Culp is concerned because he is wearing black socks. So is Aaron Graves. That puts the sock ratio of Mission Giant at five white, two black. “You guys are out,” says a band member who calls himself simply M. They take their…
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s first of three Dallas episodes aired last week with a surprise cameo–by Chomsky! “That guy’s hot!” exclaimed Carson Kressley as guitarist Glen Reynolds shook it for the camera during a sweat-soaked rendition of “15 Minutes to Rock,” performed for the Sigma Chi fraternity at…
These twitchy, tuneful Canadians have taken so long to follow up Make Up the Breakdown, the excellent album Sub Pop released in 2002 (and Reprise reissued the next year), that skeptics have begun wondering if there’s still enough interest in the new dance-rock to support Elevator, Hot Hot Heat’s third…
