Earlier this year I called the Foo Fighters’ One by One a lonely triumph for music-lovers who’d all but given up on Serious Rock Music With Heavy Things to Say About Life. I asserted that Dave Grohl’s sense of humor (and his ability to write a satisfyingly chunky melody) was…
Type O Negative can embrace only about three emotions: misery, anger or some combination of the two. So it’s no surprise to encounter more morose melodrama, haunted-house synthesizers, Sabbathian sludge and the phantom-like baritone of vocalist-bassist-beefcake brooder Peter Steele. On their latest, songs such as “IYDKMIGTHTKY (Gimme That)” and “A…
Earlier this issue I called Live’s painfully solemn Birds of Pray a sad failure for music-lovers on the search for Serious Rock Music With Heavy Things to Say About Life. Those disappointed listeners should look to Arkansas nü-metallers Evanescence–they’re lapsed Christians who curse a lot and dig Ben Affleck! Actually,…
The recent economic downturn’s been good to no one; musically speaking, it’s been a particularly rude awakening for dozens of sound-alike indie bands spoiled by the booming late 1990s, when any dot-commer with a Pavement collection could start up a label and issue records by his friends’ crappy bands (or…
There are, to be honest, several reasons why Eric Michener might not be taken seriously, the most pressing of which we will outline briefly. 1. His first Dallas gig found him opening for Jon “Corn Mo” Cunningham, a somewhat like-minded singer-songwriter who is often not taken very seriously himself, as…
The roster sounds like the invite list for an award show, maybe a rundown of the Billboard charts. Jay-Z, No Doubt, Justin Timberlake, Busta Rhymes, Nelly, Ludacris, Mystikal, Snoop Dogg, Clipse, LL Cool J, Sean Paul, P. Diddy, Scarface, Toni Braxton, TLC, ‘N Sync, Foxy Brown, Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Garbage,…
O.A.R., a five-man band from Maryland by way of Columbus, Ohio, is a jam band for the Napster age. The group, which mixes reggae, folk and agile acoustic rock into what it calls “island vibe roots rock,” arrived at Ohio State in 1997, its members having already attained a modest…
What the Drive-By Truckers created: a gorgeous, sprawling, Alabama-centric, two-CD rock epic loosely based on Lynyrd Skynyrd, literally titled Southern Rock Opera. What the Drive-By Truckers destroyed: their lives. Musicians, you see, are complete assholes–self-centered, stubborn, megalomaniacal. They chase absurd rock-god fantasies by piling into a beat-up van and blowing…
The word “punk” is like one of those pesky zombies in Night of the Living Dead: You kill it again and again, but it just won’t die. Punk’s death has been dragged out for more than two decades, since that winter of ’78 when the Sex Pistols dissolved. The genre’s…
With apologies to Brian Eno, consider Broadcast’s Hahasound its Music for Films, Vol. 3. The U.K. electronica trio’s first soundtrack-worthy excursions (the mini-album singles compilation Work and Non-Work and 2000’s The Noise Made by People) possessed cool-cat sophistication, thanks to an affinity for Stereolab-esque tunes and spy-noir ripples that hung…
George Harrison may be dead, but Americans can’t help but turn their heads, as he did, toward India for spiritual and artistic inspiration. Madonna attends self-help seminars with Deepak Chopra, city-dwelling hipsters rent Bollywood features and it all plays nicely into the hands of Rajinder Rai, a.k.a. Panjabi MC. After…
There’s a vocal trait, a rattling scrape just below the words, that somehow makes every sung syllable seem sincere. Elvis Costello has it, and so do Alejandro Escovedo and Aztec Camera’s Roddy Frame. Minibar’s Simon Petty (how’s that for a British-American name?) has it, too. That vocal “realness” turns Fly…
When a venue goes out of business, it’s rarely a party. Unless, of course, the concert hall or bar or whatever has let its liquor license lapse and is forced to give away all remaining hooch. Free drinks are free drinks–just remember to tip your bottle for the homies who…
In his 1975 travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux wrote, “Bangkok smells of sex, but this sexual aroma is mingled with the sharper whiffs of death and money.” Terry Allen, already a renowned artist in several mediums, spent six weeks in Bangkok in 1984 composing the score for Amerasia,…
I once worked as a nanny for twin 18-month-old boys who liked to body slam each other and thought nothing was funnier than smearing my cheeks with food. I kept them occupied with squeaking turtles and whistling trains, but thank God for Steve Burns. As the host of the phenomenally…
There’s no pigeonhole big enough to contain Wales’ Super Furry Animals. Their last album, 2002’s masterful Rings Around the World, blended smears of everything from sunny ’60s pop to glitch-driven techno to death metal to tropicalia onto their big, orchestral glam-rock palette, emerging with a sound–utterly coherent–that could best be…
The Heavenly States’ debut disc is one of those albums that really makes you think. Not so much about the lyrics; those are kind of a dead end (“If you look/With your eyes/Do you know/What you will find?”). But–if you’re armed with a smattering of knowledge about the Bay Area…
Chingy’s debut album rides into record stores on the strength of “Right Thurr,” an insanely catchy single full of chest-swelling keyboard melodies. It sounds like the inside of a strip club, spewing out snare effects and lewd drum patterns (inspired by the Neptunes) that twirl and clap like dancers spinning…
His career in Guided By Voices now two decades old, Bob Pollard has, for most of that time, reigned as indie rock’s resident Captain Do-No-Wrong. The guy spits out records with about the same nonchalance (and frequency) of ballplayers heaving chaw. But if you believe his fans and starry-eared critics,…
The centerpiece of Shivering King and Others is, naturally, a song called “Shivering King,” which marches along to a swampy acoustic progression with a distinguishing, focused aesthetic. “From deep beneath a disturbing dream/Awoke the shivering king/The wise of the land/All were at hand/Can they explain what it means?” asks vocalist…
Sean “P. Diddy” Combs is many things to many people: shrewd record-industry mogul, sharp producer, shiny-suited bon vivant, inventor of the remix. Yet the CDs that bear his name suggest that, above all, Combs is a master of organization, of corralling the right people to the right location at the…
We were going to start by bitching about how three of the first five tracks on Ashanti’s bloated, boring new LP are skits and intros, but then we realized that the filler was less annoying than the actual songs. “I don’t want to be this woman the second time around,”…
