Their home is the beer-soaked dives of Austin, but Okkervil River is just as comfortable in the rustic woods of New Hampshire or on a train to post-Reconstruction Kansas City. They’ve been known to belt out Appalachian murder ballads, but more often the songs are Will Sheff’s coming-of-age confessionals rife…
Here’s a family affair for indie rockers looking for proof that “settling down” doesn’t necessarily equal a creative death. Cex is Rjyan Kidwell, a young, smart guy who has played satirical glitch-techno, earnest emo-glitch, wry art-techno, menacing goth-rock and whatever he’ll give you tonight. He recently married Roby Newton, formerly…
Clair de Lune is a study in contrasts. Controlled fury. Beautiful cacophony. Sentimental anger. All of which proves that bands can draw from punk, emo and hardcore without falling prey to old stereotypes. Clair de Lune may have two voices screaming over each other, but it doesn’t sound unnecessary. It…
Something Corporate rose to mall-rock prominence with “If You C Jordan,” a spiteful piano-pop ditty about an annoying kid at school whom singer Andrew McMahon branded a “little redhead bitch.” If there’s one thing worse than a bully, it’s a bully pretending to be a sensitive guy in order to…
As she turns and saunters toward the back of the stage, giving all the tables in the front row a good long look, Paris steals a glance at the garter snug against her tanned left thigh. It’s plenty of time for her to add up the cash folded neatly under…
Portland’s Thermals remember a time when indie rock meant plugging in and making a noise as loud as your anger, or as vibrant as your excitement, or as jittery as your anxiety. Fuckin A, their second album, sounds like Superchunk back before the strings came in: short, sharp blasts of…
Any idiot with a Spin magazine and an afternoon to kill can tell you what was popular in 2004. The real trick is to predict what will be hot in the upcoming year. Although, if anything, it’s even easier than retrospection. Think of the pop-culture timeline as a telephone cord–a…
Despite the award’s legendary meaninglessness, being nominated for a Grammy can throw anyone for a loop. Suddenly, folks who would never give your record a look give it multiple listens; music-biz creeps start sniffing around, hungry for opportunity; forgotten high school chums emerge from the woodwork in search of a…
One day last September, the Curtain Club’s Doug Simmons received a call from his banker, who delivered the following news: His bank account had been frozen; the company he helped start seven years ago, Congress Street Nights (which owns Curtain Club, as well as several other Deep Ellum nightspots), was…
Last week, Scott Beggs quit his job at the Entertainment Collaborative, the company that owns and operates several Deep Ellum businesses. Beggs has been a respected and well-known member of the EC for years, most recently as a talent buyer for Trees and the Gypsy Tea Room. At press time,…
If comparing Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst to Bob Dylan seemed like a stretch before, then take a look at his latest two-album release, which may be the LP equivalent of Dylan’s infamous “Royal Albert Hall” concert. Omaha’s 24-year-old musical savant has ridden waves of praise for heartfelt, Americana-filled albums, but…
It is, without exception, bad form when a group sings about MTV on a single that will actually find its way onto the network’s rotation. This is something you’d expect from Jay-Z or late-period Duran Duran, not from Austin’s Trail of Dead, kings of the volume-crackling mayhem and violent instrument…
To be taken under the wing of Nic Harcourt, the mastermind behind the tastemaking L.A. public-radio show Morning Becomes Eclectic, you need do one of three things: 1. Write gently melodic songs about moral uplift and the triumph of the human spirit. 2. Fold into your music mild hints of…
It’s kind of absurd that the Fiery Furnaces, a brother-and-sister duo with only two albums to their name, are already releasing a collection of singles, B-sides and other ephemera. But in this pair’s warped world, where eight-minute songs pile as many disparate styles together as clothes at the local Goodwill,…
It’s hard to say which was the high point of the Granada’s Tsunami Benefit: the spine-chilling Pleasant Grove set, which lasted a mere 20 minutes but ended with an instrumental climax somewhere in the stratosphere; the piano-pounding, punch-drunk Centro-matic finale, which placed the perfect exclamation point on the evening; or…
Dallas, what is wrong with you? As of press time, tickets are still on sale for Saturday’s Arcade Fire show; other cities would murder for a chance to see the boisterous, symphonic band behind Pitchfork’s top-rated album of 2004, Funeral. “We booked a show [in San Francisco] and it sold…
The post-Radiohead saturation of grandly emotional English guitar-rock bands has pretty much been defined by a trend toward ever-greater wimpiness: Technophobic Radiohead begat rain-phobic Travis begat girl-phobic Coldplay begat Keane, who are actually afraid of guitars themselves and so therefore made Hopes and Fears, their debut, with a piano instead…
With lyrics pokin’ fun at Texas music and a sound like a psychedelic garage band with killer steel guitar, Austin’s trippy Li’l Cap’n Travis is a dream substitute for all those pretty boys pouring their hearts out on MTV after midnight. Travis’ latest album, …In All Our Splendor, is packed…
From the outside, Jimmy Eat World’s studio in Tempe, Arizona, looks like another sterile office space in a quiet business complex. But walk through the entrance, and it becomes a surprisingly cozy rock-and-roll den. There’s enough cushy seating for a decent-sized party, and instruments are strewn everywhere–a drum kit in…
Love him or hate him–there rarely is a middle ground–Pat Green is the biggest thing to come out of Texas since, well, George W. Bush. And now that Green is entering his second term as a major-label artist with his Lucky Ones CD, it appears that quite a few of…
The tsunami reports were overwhelming–an endless wash of carnage and devastation–and in the days following the disaster, Jayme Nourallah had no idea what to do. “I just kept crying about it,” says Nourallah, a freelance photographer who had visited Indonesia a month before the disaster. She couldn’t stop looking at…
Dallas has some new reality show kings. A Dozen Furies has won The Battle for Ozzfest, a contest whose spoils include $60,000, a slew of new gear from Guitar Center, a spot on next year’s Ozzfest and a recording contract with Sanctuary Records (home to Black Sabbath). The winners were…
