When Brent Best laughs, it sounds like the slide racking on a shotgun. Sounds that way when he coughs, too. Sometimes when he sings. Depends. It’s a little worse than usual right now; he and his band, Slobberbone, were on the road in Europe for a few weeks and have…
Wondering what Beck’s gonna sound like with Oklahoma psych-pop nuts the Flaming Lips as his backing band? This 20-year-old Norwegian kid’s already figured it out: On Faces Down, his very nifty debut album, Sondre Lerche juices the serpentine space-folk of Mutations and Sea Change with the candy-colored instrumental flourishes the…
Clem Snide reached new heights with last year’s The Ghost of Fashion, which contained, among other highlights, an elegant tale of a suburban first love (“Joan Jett of Arc”) and an epic meditation on Corey Feldman’s collapse (“The Junky Jews”). Now that Snide–with its melancholic disposition and the lead singer…
It’s the unimaginable, the fucking unfathomable–X, reunited ’cause it feels so good, playing live after on-and-off years of playing dead, or at least going solo (or fixing amps for the Lawd, in the case of one William Zoom). It happens every so often, when John Doe and Exene Cervenka and…
If it’s a surprise that Beck follows his least necessary album (1999’s Midnite Vultures, where he tried so hard to be Prince he seemed on the verge of ditching his name in favor of a symbol) with his most essential disc (September’s Sea Change), it shouldn’t be. After all, that’s…
Every time I accidentally catch the twin brothers who front Good Charlotte hosting MTV2’s All Things Rock (which is never more than twice a week, promise) I say a little prayer that when I was 14, Green Day’s Kerplunk represented state-of-the-art pop-punk instead of the defanged mall-rock that currently fills…
Though they’ve spent the past year playing relatively big-ass rooms like the one they’ll play here Saturday night, don’t the Strokes seem like a smaller, cooler rock band today than the one they were last fall? Minus the all-Strokes-all-the-time media coverage that met its release, Is This It, the group’s…
Thursday night’s the night for rounded-edge hip-hop that soothes as much as it moves. When Atlanta-based headliner India.Arie appeared last year with Acoustic Soul (following several years of post-Lilith Fair wandering) it seemed the neo-soul movement had gone and produced its very own Phoebe Snow, a reanimation not exactly on…
Is David Bazan–ringleader of Pedro the Lion, this show’s headliner–a masochist or just a blind supporter of new talent? We present the evidence. Exhibit A: Seldom. The three-piece from Seattle, home of Pedro and former home of Scientific, spent the spring opening up for and serving as the backup band…
For all the problems the mainstreaming of emo has created–the validation of high school whining as high art, say, or the Get Up Kids’ and the Promise Ring’s hiring big-name producers to conceal a lack of actual songs, or a dwindling supply of horn-rimmed glasses and thrift-store T-shirts–what’s cool about…
Beyoncé and her bootylicious sistren might claim survivor status, but time will tell. Twenty years down the line, when Ms. Knowles is Aimee Mann’s age, will she still be bellowing out post-feminist female-empowerment anthems? Will she even have a career in show business? The odds are against it. Mann, on…
There’s nothing wrong with self-consciously lightweight pop records that seem to exist solely to spark a smile or a warm flutter in the abdomen–ever heard the Association’s “Never My Love” on a rainy Sunday afternoon and wished it would go on forever? On Guestroom the self-consciously lightweight New York City…
Ladytron makes music simultaneously from decades past and decades yet to come. Their layered beats and hovercraft grooves suggest the morning radio of an anonymous metropolis circa 2804 A.D. or the most forward-looking synth-pop of 1982. Which brings us to some place in the middle of that continuum: The group’s…
Business is down in Deep Ellum. Heard around 30 percent from some, a little higher from others. Some clubs are doing better than others, of course, and some are just hoping to get through this. We’ve heard plenty of off-the-record stuff, plenty of conversations that end with “and you did…
The heart of hip-hop is in Billings, Montana. Really. Right now, at this moment, that’s exactly where it is. At a rest stop, to be precise, if you want to get technical. But don’t go looking for it, because by the time you get there, it’ll be long gone, back…
Dan Bejar needed a change or, at the very least, a break. Needed to get away from what he was doing, needed to get away from where he was doing it. He was born and raised (mostly) in Vancouver, spent his entire adult life there. And for most of that…
I was in Amsterdam cooking a stir-fry for a house full of people when I got the news about 2Pac. I stepped into the rest room for a moment. Midstream, one of my best friends started pounding on the door hollering, “Oh, my God, they shot Pac! They shot Pac!”…
Overseas, Ash would be touring in support of its recent best-of, Intergalactic Sonic 7″s, released in the U.K. in September. They’d be pushing their new single, “Envy” (also included on Intergalactic), which wonders what it would sound like if the Undertones heard the same symphony the Supremes did, with its…
Françoise Cactus and Brezel Göring weren’t exaggerating when they named their band Stereo Total: A French-German duo based in Berlin and given to collaborating with various other folks who pay for their records with euros, ST makes a version of cut-and-paste pop that doesn’t cut much, a spirited, surprisingly subtle…
The 21-year-old Baltimore kid who’s headlining this traveling tour of artists affiliated with the Bay Area electronic-music indie Tigerbeat6 calls himself Cex, and if you think that’s funny, you’ll love Tall, Dark, and Handcuffed, his new album. Like much of the stuff Tigerbeat6 releases, it’s a sometimes tacit, sometimes active…
Long-haired Arizona troubador Roger Clyne kicks off the title track of his latest album, Sonoran Hope and Madness, with a volley of fireworks–and a typical show from the Peacemakers, his sharp band of compadres, promises equally high spirits, with a sometimes irritatingly generous approach inherent in their life-affirming brio. The…
The Epoxies’ name is no misnomer. Just like glue, the Portland band’s new wave-meets-punk tunes get stuck in one’s head with their shredding guitars, bopping keyboards and the voice of female leader Roxy Epoxy, which shifts from Exene Cervenka growl to straight-forward Missing Persons-style singing to the mid-’80s hiccup emphasis…
