If you’ve got a taste for long-running rock-and-roll bands, you can wait till the Rolling Stones make their way to San Antonio in November to get your rocks off this autumn. But you might do just as well heading to the Ridglea Theater on Saturday night and watching Luna, New…
Luna’s show Saturday night at the Ridglea Theater is the week’s best alternative to seeing the Stones next month in San Antonio; Ryan Adams’ gig the same night at the Granada is the second-best. Or is it? When it’s not hitting the spot, Demolition, a new CD of tunes the…
Two dozen musicians. That’s enough for, say, six bands, and that’s being conservative. You could book an entire weekend at just about any local club with that many players to choose from. That number, however, is not enough for The Polyphonic Spree: The group wants to add one more member,…
Dave Minner got his stage name a decade ago, back when he was spinning records at The Hottie Shop, the electronic-music record store he opened in his hometown of Orlando. And, once you understand what it means (think AK-47, the assault weapon Jackie Brown’s Ordell Robbie is talking about when…
Two months ago, Norah Jones went into the office of Bruce Lundvall, the president of Blue Note Records, and asked of him something no musician has ever asked of a record label boss. “Haven’t I sold enough records yet?” she wondered. Simply, she was tired, cranky, verging on burnout. Twelve-hour…
Subtle as a sharp blow to the groin. That’s how Phonosynthesis–the latest mix opus by L.A.’s spirited decks-mistress DJ Irene–begins. Starting out at an alarming 140 beats per minute with her own co-production “Acid Eaterz” and then launching into a one-woman display of some of the hardest progressive house, breakbeat…
“The subway is a porno/The pavements, they are a mess.” So desperately intones Interpol’s Paul Banks just a few lines into “NYC,” itself just a few tracks into Interpol’s debut full-length, Turn on the Bright Lights. “NYC” is a downcast and pointed song, a dismayed meditation on the squalid streets…
OK, the name is, let’s just say, unfortunate. (If you think four guys with a name like Manplanet should be ending their set with, say, “It’s Raining Men” and/or “YMCA,” well, consider us on the same page.) That aside, this Minneapolis quartet sounds (and looks) more like Devo, only if…
So many respectable B-list indie-rockers hitting town this week it’s a wonder they didn’t all coordinate their schedules and throw a big convention–there’s bound to be room at the Polyphonic Spree’s place for all of them, and just imagine the 3 a.m. games of Truth or Dare waiting to be…
“There he is, ladies and gentlemen!” says the voice in the megaphone down New York’s Fifth Avenue. “Enrique Lavin!” Wrong. Same first name, different writer. But José Luis Abreu, a.k.a. Fofé, the singer for Puerto Rico’s Circo, is usually right. He has the memory of a Sanskrit scholar–and the business…
Last September, Roger Clyne organized a gathering at a southern Arizona fairgrounds to celebrate the Festival of the Chubascos–chubascos being shorter and fiercer Mexican versions of the monsoons that Arizonans contend with every year. The part of the chubascos phenomenon that Clyne really loves is that people in Mexico eagerly…
For all the talk of hot new garage-rock bands making their way out of expensive rehearsal spaces in gentrified New York City neighborhoods, this year’s most crucial artifact of scrappy guitar-bass-drums friction is the sixth album from a Portland-based band that, as its album artwork has it, practices in a…
A few weeks ago I called the Lenny Kravitz/Pink/Abandoned Pools show that stopped in at the Smirnoff Music Centre the summer’s most cynically assembled package tour. That was an easy call–it was August, and anyone hitting the road with Kravitz obviously isn’t hankering for a slam-bang set of rock and…
It’s Monday night, a quarter till 11, and Whiskey Glass Eye is onstage. Or, they’re supposed to be. Instead, the members of the Slobberbone cover band are scattered around Muddy Waters, blending into the sparse school-night crowd in booths and at the bar, smoking cigarettes, drinking beers. Muddy Waters’ P.A…
A.I., Artificial Intelligence (DreamWorks): Shiny L.A. synth-rockers with Ray Manzarek’s kid on keyboards, A.I. faces some pretty stiff competition from Deadsy, the shiny L.A. synth-rock outfit led by Cher and Gregg Allman’s son. Artificial intelligence? To say the least. –Mikael Wood Blue Crush: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Virgin): A…
N.W.A. (or, if you prefer, Niggaz With Attitude) was a group of high school dropouts (save lyricist Ice Cube) who pretended to be racist gangsters, dope dealers, cop killers, rapists and murderous thugs. To the uninitiated first-time listener, their music was a vivid how-to manual for bombings and drive-by shootings…
It begins with an apology because it has to. Before we can talk about his band’s new album, Kill the Moonlight, before we can talk about anything else. See, I spoke with Spoon singer-guitarist Britt Daniel a few months ago, after a Friday-night gig at Trees. He was talking to…
NASA’s chief of the Astronaut Corps sits behind a lectern with three other space travelers. At his immediate left is one of Russia’s top cosmonauts, and next to him is a European astronaut, the greatest fighter pilot in Belgian (!) history. At the far end is Lance Bass, a well-coiffed,…
A couple of years ago, shortly after I quit my job and moved to England to write a damned novel, I went to see Radney Foster play a solo show at a smoky London club. He often stops there on his way to visit his kid who lives in France,…
And so the summer-concert season winds to its slow denouement with Ozzy Osbourne’s traveling freak show setting up shop at the Smirnoff Music Centre on Sunday for 14 hours of occasionally devil-worshiping, more often simply loud live entertainment. The show boasts its usual share of filler–Seether, Ill Niño, Switched, Chevelle,…
“Go play in New York.” That’s the advice OHNO singer-guitarist Steve Holt has for pretty much every local band, and the rest of the group seconds the motion, nodding in unison as soon as he says it. At the moment, they’re not going anywhere, just waiting for a shipment of…
How indie rock got its groove back: Four D.C. scenesters listen to ZZ Top’s Eliminator nonstop for a week, realize its might but recognize its limits (narrow field of focus, reluctance to test goal-oriented MTV viewers’ patience, songs exclusively about body parts or carburetors) and set about retooling the formula…
