Tom Waits is back, and he’s a little hard to love. The man capable of writing a ballad as fragile as a convict’s conscience just wants to make the sonic equivalent of a dirty bomb. The result is an album full of wicked foot-stompers, riddled with minor-key buzzmuffle and drenched…
Reduced to hard, cold factoids, Tegan and Sara sound like they were dreamed up by a focus group convened in an alternate-universe shopping-mall food court: two Canadian sisters, both lesbians, who play zippy folk-pop with careful harmonies out of the Indigo Girls songbook, clipped guitar strums cribbed from Elastica’s first…
Not a rock band, not a pop band, but not an orchestra, either: The Arcade Fire’s sprawling debut album, Funeral, wanders through too many genres to net a simple description, although “frickin’ amazing” might do the trick. In an era that expects buzz bands to add as many instruments as…
Kari Wuhrer + (Don Johnson / Bruce Willis?) x [Margo Timmons x .42982 + Traci Lords? – p / (Jennifer Love Hewitt + David Hasselhoff)] – Milla Jovovich + (Vanessa Paradis / Naomi Campbell x 3/4) — (Corey Feldman / 8 + Jamie-Lynn Sigler x Alyssa Milano) + Didi Conn?…
Steve Earle can write a political song that actually does more than just preach and irritate. Maybe it’s the storytelling that bolsters this consideration of what soldiers endure. In “Rich Man’s War” three blue-collar workers answer a call from their country. “Home to Houston” tells the story of a trucker…
The curse of the sophomore record is legendary. Yet for most bands, the second long-player is richer than the first–the raw energy of the debut ripened, deepened, expanded into a mature voice. Think Radiohead and The Bends. The danger of that second record, consequently, is that a band’s idiom can’t…
The voice and vintage-R&B vibe of Joss Stone’s 2003 debut, The Soul Sessions, were so at odds with reality–how could the second coming of Aretha be a lily-white British teen?–that it’s still hard to believe. But not only does Mind, Body & Soul repeat the trick, it betters it: Substituting…
Like so many shaggy-haired roots-rockers before him, Montreal’s Sam Roberts writes songs about meeting cold, cold girls and finding himself on the road to confusion, then plays them like the only thing he’s unsure of is the number of drinks to order from the bar before last call. On We…
Considered one of the godfathers of Americana, Dave Alvin is having one of the most unexpected rebirths in recent memory. His new effort, Ashgrove, is being hailed as some kind of modern blues classic. It isn’t. Remotely clichéd (as was his work with the legendary Blasters), it is, however, dynamic…
Feel like participating at a concert? If waving your hands in the air like you just don’t care sounds insufficient, see Mt. Eerie, who may very well drag you onstage and add you to the band’s choir. Mt. Eerie (formerly the Microphones) is really just Phil Elverum (formerly Phil Elvrum),…
It’d be easy to assume that the press attention and record-biz hype showered on Omaha’s indie-rock scene are what’s fueled the artistic hubris of the city’s acts–Bright Eyes’ short-story-length album titles and upcoming double CD, Tim Kasher’s dual leadership of Cursive and the Good Life, the Faint’s naming a song…
Who Said Rock Was Easy? It wasn’t an easy ACL Fest. The lack of any banter from Black Francis (Frank Black, whatever) and the Pixies was unnerving. So was their decision to forgo both an encore and their one pop hit “Here Comes Your Man” in front of this huge…
Michael Anthony used to drink Jack Daniel’s straight from the bottle. The fleshy Van Halen bassist, whose body once looked as if it were held together by Bisquick and bourbon, would gulp the stuff down right onstage, draining liter bottles of Tennessee’s finest, to no end but his own. The…
When Austin City Limits premiered their little music festival, they swore up and down they’d move the date in the future. Fast forward two years, and many things have changed–the lineup grew legendary, the crowds exploded (this year boasted around 200,000 attendants), the ticket price shot up, but there we…
Before Canadian power pop quartet Sloan took the stage Thursday night at Trees, vocalist/bassist Chris Murphy and vocalist/guitarist Patrick Pentland played an acoustic set outside the DART bus stop at Akard and Pacific streets. With only about a dozen onlookers, it was undoubtedly the smallest crowd on the band’s tour,…
Richmond, Virginia’s Lamb of God is a refreshing anomaly in the world of mainstream metal. They love a swinging 6/8 beat more than a solid 4/4 thud, they feature a clean-shaven guy with short hair, and on Ashes of the Wake, their third album, they espouse a staunchly anti-Dubya, heartily…
Hip-hop’s flavor-of-the-minute aesthetic keeps the music perpetually exciting, even as it makes successful long-term careers as unlikely as Al Franken endorsing Bush. Contrarians inevitably point to LL Cool J–the lone old-school rapper with a flag still planted near the chart summit–as proof the odds can be beaten. But in 2004,…
There are musicians, and then there are artists. Blessed with a name befitting a gourmet cook, Southern California sound professor Boyd Rice instead took no name at all. He recorded his first batch of hypnotic looped-tape sound collages in 1975, adopting the name Non soon thereafter to describe his mission…
So this is the end of it, the final drop of blood squeezed from the tombstone. After the boxed sets and script books comes this wonderful little soundtrack packed with anthems and incidentals and even outtakes (Mr. Rosso going “Up on Cripple Creek”). It’s a perfect adios of a package:…
With its nine-minute songs and indulgent feedback, Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born is better seen as a concert album, full of the screaming musical tangents you expect from a live show. There’s a reason for that: Before laying down tracks, the band played the songs on tour, cracking them open…
Kansas City’s the Anniversary tweaked emo tradition in two ways: 1. They had a female singer, which meant frontman Josh Berwanger could only pull off so much girls-are-mean before Adrianne Pope would defend her kind, and 2. They were willing to grow, going from synth-pop cuties to prog-rock scaries in…
Pregnant women get the weirdest cravings. One of our buddies was once sent out at three in the morning for a hollandaise run, while our own father kept nine flavors of ice cream handy at all times before we were born. But watch out if your laboring lady goes all-out…
