The good news is that Flickerstick’s playing early, as part of a Friday-night warm-up gig for KDGE-FM’s annual alt-rock cluster that will also include a set by casual misogynist Custom, whose “Hey Mister”–the one in which the raspy-voiced New Yorker promises a young woman’s father that when he’s “horny like…
If ex-Wilco multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett’s new album, The Palace at 4am (Part 1), is a challenge to the studio-borne alt-country he helped create on Wilco’s new Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, well, Wilco wins. But if the disc, which Bennett made with friend and fellow songwriter Edward Burch, is any indication of…
Genuflecting at the altar of Black Sabbath, English doom-metal trio Electric Wizard delivers monumental, glacial riffs that roar with enough post-apocalyptic fury to earn it the title of the heaviest band in the land. Deep Purple’s Roger Glover once said, “Heavy isn’t about volume; it’s about attitude,” and he could…
It’s a perfect pairing: Johnny Marr, the former guitarist of the Smiths, one of the world’s most impossibly melodramatic rock bands, and the Pet Shop Boys, one of the world’s most theatrical pop groups, joining forces for a set of fey, delicately heartbroken love songs packed with sophisticated melodies and…
According to Amazon.com (but against my better judgment), Poison has a new album out. It’s called Hollyweird, and the cover features a naked woman with an enormous dragon tattoo astride a motorcycle, about to pull onto Hollyweird Boulevard, which apparently is a street that time forgot, since you can also…
Here’s how screwed up the music business is, in 100 words or less. You’re likely familiar with this story. Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was deemed sales cyanide by Reprise Records, so they ditched the record and the band along with it. Wilco bought back Yankee Hotel Foxtrot from Reprise and…
The late-’90s bust-up of that dog. was predictable, at least to the handful who cared; we few fans shrugged and said only, “Of course.” A band eternally on the verge succumbed to the grim inevitable, because there was no way a Los Angeles pop band–fronted by a could-be pinup with…
Latin ska bands suck. Actually, all modern ska bands suck, period, and they suck in Spanish, English and Croatian. Early Fabulosos Cadillacs and a few other post-Specials by-products notwithstanding, the “refreshing” ska movement is as imaginative as the best of the middle-class, white, one-hit-wonder rasta bands that tend to disappear…
On their debut, an embracing of rural Southern stereotypes called Watermelon, Chicken and Gritz, these self-professed down-to-earth “Country Boyz” rap about “Blowin’ Trees” and “Kentucky Mud.” The members of Nappy Roots are, as they aver more than once, “knee deep, head over heels in this country shit.” Except not really…
Joe Cripps sits on the porch of his house near Argyle, a sweaty glass of Maker’s Mark at his feet, a pile of dusty 45s by his side. It’s early evening in early May and the sun is setting on the home he shares with his girlfriend Ashley, their dogs…
The old man onstage at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios–the guy with the face like a weathered catcher’s mitt who is sitting in a wheelchair in his satin coach’s jacket and gimme cap, fretting his baby-blue Gretsch with a butter knife clutched in his polio-stricken right hand–is probably the only person…
In the past, the Get Up Kids’ best defense against the emo tag was its live show. Onstage, the band keeps naysayers at a safe distance–its guitar riffs blast with an intensity that has never translated to disc. Even if an ear-plugged bully came close enough to smack a “Kick…
Will Goo Goo Doll Johnny Rzeznik ever be satisfied? Not with his personal life–there’s a trail of Goo songs about dashed hopes long enough to suggest that Rzeznik’s stream of pent-up disappointment will never run dry–but with the lucidity of his sleek pop-rock, which since the Dolls’ 1995 breakthrough disc,…
Lots going on this week for fans of denatured guitar rock. First up, headlining the Ridglea Theater on Friday night, is Trans Am, three zany Washington, D.C., gearheads who’ve spent six albums figuring out how to best emasculate that form. They used to do it by laughing with it: The…
Long-haired rock weirdos won’t be the only ones hitting Dallas en masse this week; expect a number of short-haired hip-hop weirdos, too. Rubber Gloves is the place, and though the festivities will be spread over two nights, comprising stops on two separate package tours, the MCs and DJs (and lone…
Shannon Wright’s as much an actress as a singer, a director as much as a musician, with exquisitely crafted songs suffused with such drama and intensity that they’re best described as chamber theater. There’s an eerie expressionistic quality about her music, from the trembling tympani and haunting sustains of the…
Given the contrarian nature of the underground, it was inevitable that naïve indie rockers who described their music interests as “anything but country” end up drawn to their genre blind spot. Distancing themselves from Nashville, they’ve affixed an alt- prefix to these rootsy forays, but it’s a meaningless misnomer that…
Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (better known to most as Arts Magnet High School) will host a 25th birthday party for itself May 26 at Gypsy Tea Room. It’s the curtain-closing event of a Memorial Day weekend that will reunite every Booker T. Washington…
If you don’t believe that underground hip-hop is enjoying a serious renaissance right now, just listen to El-P’s brilliant solo debut, Fantastic Damage. Maybe “enjoying” is the wrong word: The oh-so-appropriately-titled album doesn’t sound like it’s enjoying much of anything, save for the ruin of listener-friendly mainstream rap. But that…
We regard the Breeders as perhaps you regard your no-account, jail-prone Uncle Bob–if he shows up for Thanksgiving dinner at all, you’re happy and relieved. Even if he’s wearing his pants inside out and drooling all over the table. Yeah, savor that image. Title TK certainly embodies it. As the…
Steven Collins found what he was looking for at an abandoned Mexican porn theater an hour or so outside Los Angeles, 60 miles south on the seedy side of sleepy Oxnard. Or he thought he would, anyway. That was the plan. Where he ended up was just as strange a…
The logistics are enough to discourage any band from moving to New York City. Think about it: find an absurdly expensive and tiny rehearsal space in some borough outpost. (Never mind Manhattan. These days East Village bands are about as common as dodo birds). For load-ins, schlep your guitars and…
