After listening to Tahiti 80’s Wallpaper for the Soul for the first time, I thought I had these guys pegged. They hailed from somewhere in Kansas, and from this middle American locale they were trying desperately, and obviously at great distance, to channel very specific frequencies of Europop. They were…
Within the dance-music community, everyone will admit to the towering influence of Paul Oakenfold over the industry’s direction and sound–some more grudgingly than others. Since starting his DJ career with the UK club night Funhouse in 1984, Oakenfold has helped elevate the dance-floor DJ from anonymous salaryman to bona fide…
Cody Chesnutt couldn’t be more sincere. It’s a typically hot July night in Hollywood, and he’s onstage at the Knitting Factory, halfway through “Up in the Treehouse,” a honey-sweet love song from his double-album debut, The Headphone Masterpiece. “Dream, dream, that’s all I dooo,” goes the lyric. “Dream, dream, about…
Mark Ridlen hates karaoke. He begrudgingly bought a karaoke machine two years ago because he was tired of having “some anonymous drunk” mess with his equipment when he was DJing corporate parties and weddings. He figured if they wanted to belt out “I’m So Excited” or whatever, they could screw…
Need a shot of pure Midwestern rage this week, but can’t find anyone willing to go see 8 Mile for the eighth time? Take your tortured ass down to Deep Ellum Live on Tuesday night, where Taproot, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Mudvayne, from Peoria, Illinois, will prove just how…
The new TLC record feels less icky to me than the last Who tour, but I’m not sure why. Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey explained their quick return to the road in July with a well-paid session guy in John Entwistle’s place as a tribute to the enduring spirit of…
At Madison Square Garden (Sony Legacy)
American IV: The Man Comes Around (American/Lost Highway)
Dressed in Black (Dualtone)
Kindred Spirits (Sony)
A comp of many purposes: to raise money for the War Child charity, which feeds the young and hungry in war-torn countries (baking bread in Afghanistan at this very moment, in fact), to celebrate 50 years of NME’s showcasing the tops of the UK-singles pops and to illustrate how today’s…
Talib Kweli has a welterweight’s agility, and Jay-Z has a middleweight’s saunter, but the rappers have claimed the heavyweight titles in their respective rings. After defining the parameters of underground hip-hop in 1998 as half of Black Star, Kweli has since dedicated himself to shredding those parameters, renouncing the asceticism…
Had a good time at last weekend’s North Texas New Music Festival, though we noticed attendance was slightly down. Not so much that you’d see if you weren’t looking. The actual numbers probably don’t even matter; the festival got more people to come down to Deep Ellum than anything else…
Writing about band names is one of the great clichés in rock journalism. Every group with an off-kilter appellation has an allegedly amusing or revealing (and often lengthy) story about how its stage alias was invented, but the majority of these tales are about as fascinating as a day spent…
You will never make out with one of the Donnas. Sorry. You’re a chump. Chump clothes, chump lingo, chump taste in liquor. Ain’t no way you’ll get your hands on these four bombastic California lasses, who’ve somehow evolved from a cutesy indie-rock girl group to an ass-kickin’, name-takin’ arena-rock monstrosity…
“God knows how I adore life,” Beth Gibbons whispers at album’s dawn, before it gives way to 10 songs that suggest the opposite; “so tired of life,” she sings one track later, reveling (as much as someone sounding fresh, or not, from a nap can sound) in the contradiction. The…
If Pearl Jam once came across as a group of populist party-poopers who helped put a bar code on teen-age angst, these born-again progressives now seem bent on forsaking their riches for righteousness. With a new album of wild-eyed, off-the-cuff rockers with little commercial potential (including a temperamental attack on…
It’s been a good year for gently genre-jamming albums by rangy roots-music ladies–recent discs from Allison Moorer, Patty Griffin, Norah Jones and Caitlin Cary have shown how possible it is to dress up country intimacy in pop pleasure without sounding like Shania or Faith or LeAnn. Even Sheryl Crow’s C’mon,…
Chris Robinson’s learned a lot since his days fronting America’s best jam-band-that-actually-wrote-great-songs, the Black Crowes: “Your California traffic,” he observes in “Sunday Sound,” a tune on New Earth Mud, his new solo joint, “I said, well, it just ain’t no fun.” And from “Katie Dear”: “Tuesday morning, hear the traffic…
Like a two-headed Hydra made of spare Ramones and Cramps parts left over in the lab, the Groovie Ghoulies decree that every day is Halloween and make every stage their own personal (albeit cheerful) abattoir. Spawned on the shadowy streets of Sacramento, the threesome is celebrating a new album on…
I don’t really put much stock in the concept of the guilty pleasure, but if you’re gonna feel guilty about liking something, shouldn’t it be really pleasurable? That’s the question Diana Krall’s new Verve disc, Live in Paris, keeps asking me: The Canadian singer-pianist’s playing is certainly fine, and her…
Lots of revised-history indie rock in town this week. Matt Pond PA, a sextet from Pennsylvania built around a dude named Matt Pond, wonders what the fussy English folk songs of Nick Drake and John Martyn would sound like if written and played by a sextet from Pennsylvania; the answer,…
Everybody knows that Shania Twain and Mutt Lange got married forever ago (did you see the picture? Mutt looks like Patrick Swayze with Melissa Manchester’s perm, so it’s no wonder Behind the Music keeps using that one photo), but did you know that they freaking live in Switzerland!? I fully…
Burnout rears its disillusioned head in all sorts of music scenes, but rarely does anyone figure they can rock a party with it. So this puts Jon Nowell and Daniel Ormondroyd of FC Kahuna at an advantage. They may not be able to place themselves at the forefront of a…
Week in, week out, we talk about what we think is right and wrong with local music, what needs to happen, what’s happening too often. That kind of thing. This week, we thought it would be a good idea to give someone else a chance to speak, especially in light…
