I freaking love this band, and there’s not much more to say. Thank God for whatever it was that got Beth Ditto, Nathan Howdeshell and Kathy Mendonca out of Searcy, Arkansas. House shows with The Gossip are among the finer things in Olympia life, along with Oly stubbies and the…
Didn’t take long for neo-soul or whatever you wanna call it–Raphael Saadiq prefers “gospeldelic,” it seems–to become another ghetto, another programming block on MTV, another marketing tool, a sticker on a jewel case, a recommended-if-you-like shrug. Even an album title, judging from former Tony Toni Toné singer Saadiq’s solo debut…
Everything in his little patch of Texas was blooming except for those high skinny weeds, and Darden Smith couldn’t decide what to do about it. The Austin-based songwriter had had a plan for his back yard, once upon a time. The earth between his house and his home studio had…
The building at 508 Park Avenue isn’t much of one, just a shell, really, not that different from the dozens of other abandoned husks cluttering downtown Dallas. It’s still worth plenty to the Glazer family (whose main concern is Glazer’s Distributors, a major food and beverage supplier), owners of the…
With the music he composed for last year’s John Travolta techno-clunker Swordfish, trance titan Paul Oakenfold confused the idea of composing a soundtrack with actually replicating the crashes and explosions crucial to any big-budget action flick. The resultant album was music-as-extreme sport, the bloodless electronic rush of trance married to…
Nü metal is pretty patently the mainstream now; the charts are full of Stainds, Nickelbacks, Disturbeds and other bands for whom personal torment and societal persecution aren’t just the potential results of lifestyle choices but ideal states of being, conditions to be prized and fetishized. In our accelerated consumer culture,…
Not to get all George W. on your ass, but how come one of the most exciting English-speaking rock bands currently capturing American hearts is from Sweden? I thought the Strokes were supposed to be a reminder of our knack for empty calories–the Hives just plow over the Fab Five…
He doesn’t write songs about being Texan, drinkin’ Shiner, plowing a rut on Interstate 35, pulling into Gruene Hall, selling out for a case of Miller Lite. That’s why he’s not staring out from the cover of the latest issue of Texas Monthly, another blond head with that coy who-me?…
Kori Gardner, 27, and Jason Hammel, 25, went to Tahiti after their wedding last summer, but their real honeymoon didn’t start until they got back to their hometown of San Francisco. That was when the duo, better known as Mates of State, loaded their Yamaha Electone organs and drum kit…
A freshly scrubbed alternative to last week’s grungy Edgefest, KISS-FM’s summer throwdown might be the perfect little diversion this weekend if you’re looking for moderately shiny pop that floats like a butterfly and then ends. Actually, The Calling does sting a bit: Its Camino Palmero is freeze-dried modern rock without…
Reasons why Guided By Voices’ new Universal Truths and Cycles (due June 18) will be called a “return to form” or some such: Because it’s filled with the kind of let-it-blurt blasts of verse-chorus-next! they turned into pop art on 1994’s Bee Thousand and 1995’s Alien Lanes. (The 36-second “Wire…
December 2000. Snoop Dogg is scheduled to perform at the Gypsy Tea Room as part of a promotional tour for his new release, Tha Last Meal. At the time, I found myself in the employment of said establishment, and having handled countless esoteric/idiotic requests from bands over the years, I…
Your quick Danzig for Dummies: Back when you were in grade school, he was in a band called The Misfits. You went to junior high, he started Samhain. By the time you got your G.E.D., Glenn Danzig had graduated to becoming his own main man. I’m pretty sure that both…
True story and, come to think of it, we’ve probably told this one before: A couple of years ago, we went to see the Beastie Boys at the Fort Worth Convention Center. Had pretty good seats, affording us a prime view of the in-the-round stage setup, as well as allowing…
Think of it this way, and perhaps Marshall Mathers’ (or Eminem’s, or Slim Shady’s) 25-mil-plus-sold popularity makes more sense to the old farts who stoop to find him repellent. He’s the bleached-blond Holden Caulfield, a catcher in the dye job loaded down by “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”…
If blink-182’s last record, the surprisingly maudlin Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, was like a pinch of novocaine in the Vaseline, the debut from Boxcar Racer (a side project featuring blink singer-guitarist Tom Delonge and drummer Travis Barker) is even more numbing. Listening to this disc–with its pair of…
It’s too easy to write him off, though the temptation’s there; has been for damned near two decades, since he asked us to dance and promptly strapped on two left feet. Ah, but what the realist calls “murky ambition” the apologist deems “experimental victory.” So, then, what makes Heathen Bowie’s…
At last year’s Latin Grammys, Juanes was the most nominated artist (seven), eventually winning three trophies. But on the same day he was going to have the Big Night (September 11, 2001), the Twin Towers came down, taking the Latin Grammy ceremony with them, and Juanes’ title track (“Fíjate Bien”),…
For all its technical, sample-splicing glory, the reason DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… became a modern classic was how deftly it conjured the raw source code of human melancholy out of elements pilfered from a seemingly infinite pile of dusty thrift-shop vinyl. No other electronic musician had come so close in 1996…
While this summer’s biggest affront to expectation unquestionably belongs to David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar–who besides their managers would’ve guessed a year ago that these two losers would kiss and make up?–Dallas indie-rockers are also in for a surprise at Rubber Gloves, when they find that Elf Power and…
To friends and music business associates, 43-year-old Ty Thomas is a former member of a popular early-’90s alternative pop-rock band from Dallas that called itself The Crossing; a gifted but frustrated musician who dropped out, only to recently return as a songwriter with a larger-than-life dream. To another generation, however,…
Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind, and the irresponsibility of the artist and the…
