It didn’t take me long to give into “The Game of Love,” the single from that newish Santana album that Michelle Branch sings–maybe four or five times on the radio, then one or two on the CD as I checked the liner notes to see if they actually gave a…
The four-band tag-team lineup is a full 360 degrees of the overtly fast and furious. This year Glassjaw occupies the headliner’s slot, and will be taking no shorts from frenetic show openers Hot Water Music. Each band represents opposite ends of the cacophony half-pipe, like water for chocolate or a…
Tweed’s debut, Jet Lag Heart, is an 11-song remedy made of mellow bellows and sad thoughts thick on the common themes of regret and hazy dreams. In other words: great make-out music. Or even better: beer-drinking music. Singer-guitarist John Garrett gets all “tied in a knot” because “it ain’t easy…
It doesn’t stretch the imagination much to use some pedal steel and a few maracas to evoke the landscape of the Southwest–rocky desert, border towns–but the remarkable thing about Calexico has always been the way Joey Burns and John Convertino tread beyond the clichés of their band’s country and mariachi…
Every year around this time, we start complaining about the fact that the annual South by Southwest is in Austin and why can’t it be in Dallas and we just want to drink a lot and sleep in our own bed. Blah blah blah. Gotten plenty of mileage out of…
Here’s the most significant way having a baby has changed Kasey Chambers’ life: “I used to, as soon as I walked off stage, I would go straight to the back room and have a cigarette. And soon as I got pregnant, I gave up smoking. And now, I walk straight…
Rock and roll can will a peculiar sort of transformation upon a musician. For former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, the transformations he’s undergone since starting this life in 1963 as John Maher have been subtle yet profound. A music obsessive who fronted several go-nowhere bands, Marr made the jump to…
The soundtrack to the new Laurence Fishburne motorcycle fiasco Biker Boyz skews toward those hip-hop loyalists enticed by big-screen Ruff Ryders iconography–typical Jadakiss bluster; a tasty Redman joint; Mowett & Loon’s awful, Toto-sampling “Tru Rider”–but it also takes a cue from Kid Rock (who turns up in the movie) in…
Certain creative outfits possess the unusual quality of developing personalities that shift and change as subtly yet as certainly as a human being’s. And as Massive Attack enters its second decade, it does so without founding members Mushroom (Andrew Vowles) and Daddy Gee (Grant Marshall, who is currently on sabbatical…
Lo-fi indie-pop gets a startling makeover in the able hands of Phil Elvrum, the young Washington state producer-musician who fronts the loose aggregate of crunchy creative types known as the Microphones. Over a series of albums and singles, Elvrum has methodically disassembled the idea of the shaggy-haired dude with a…
With last year’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Jeff Tweedy led Wilco into less-tone/more-drone terrain, determined, it seems, to record the weirdest folk songs of all time. Jim O’Rourke, on the other hand, has pared down his avant-eclectic sound in recent years, often opting for more traditional rock-guitar diatribes and sneering vocal…
Deep down, the lit majors don’t care as much about what he has to say as much as how he says it. So he’s got a novel to his name; big whoop. Ethan Hawke has two, and you don’t see anyone rushing to his defense every time his goatee grows…
Unknown, or at least underrated, Ted Leo swivels his hips like a young Elvis P. and sneers like a younger Elvis C. on Hearts of Oak, pounding the pulpit and sounding the alarm. Flipping through a history book while rocketing into the future, he still can’t quite escape what’s going…
January 31 was supposed to be a big night for the local hip-hop community. That was when Final Friday, the monthly urban music showcase put together by The A-Teem Alumni (Brian “Viz” Walker and Jonathan “Fatz” Dangerfield), would debut at its new home, Gypsy Tea Room, after a three-year run…
Damien Kulash is getting a little tired of all the questions about semiotics. Now, this is an issue you might expect from, say, a member of the Académie Française, or a Warhol manqué making silk screens of Osama, or Spielberg toward the end of a Q&A at Berkeley. But it’s…
In the opening cut of Kill the Moonlight, the latest celebrated release by the bracing minimalist rock group Spoon, singer Britt Daniel unreels the album’s central theme by describing a life lived for “Small Stakes.” It could be about any wage slave who “feels all right from Friday night to…
With the release of the Wallflowers’ fourth album, Red Letter Days, front man Jakob Dylan solidly lets go of his father’s coattails and begins to pave a path for future Dylans to explore, his own legacy. After the dim Breach in 2000, Dylan shows maturity and versatility exceeding his previous…
Aren’t Papa Roaches supposed to survive damn near anything the world can throw at them, up to and including all-out nuclear war? When these vociferous nü-metallurgists crawled out from beneath their Northern California rock in 2000 with their major-label debut, Infest, it looked as though that scene had produced its…
One could easily write off Bologna, Italy’s Forty Winks as just another group of punks with a number in their band’s name, tattoos on their arms and their hearts on their sleeves. But the comparisons to blink-182 and Sum 41’s juvy-punk (which are surely expectable and, on some songs, not…
Though he’s fallen so deeply in love with his own voice that he’s now unable to distinguish between pining and whining–seen the live video for “Clocks,” where he does a little ill-advised scatting over that glittering groove?–Coldplay front man Chris Martin has emerged as the New British Guitar-Pop Thing’s de…
Fans already have their faves–the 1975 original Broadway recording with Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera, the 1996 Broadway revival starring Bebe Neuwirth and Ann Reinking, the ’98 Brit-hits-the-fans disc featuring Ute Lemper and Ruthie Henshall–over which they argue in chat rooms and Amazon customer-comment forums. Of the three, the first…
“Try, try, try,” Billy Corgan moaned shortly before his Smashing Pumpkins turned to mush. If history is any indication, he was most likely imploring the Little Mermaid’s dad to turn him into a dolphin, but he might well have been talking to his future self: “Billy, when the Pumpkins break…
