If you’ll bear with us for a moment, we have a hypothetical we’d like to share. Say a small, no-name label in the Los Angeles suburbs enters into a joint-venture agreement with a much bigger, well-funded label. With the agreement comes expectations, of course; the bigger label wants to see…
Getting married is probably a trip: If you’re in love, vowing the vows can undo that; if you’re not, the legality may tie the knot. And if you’re either member of the Nathan Larson-Nina Persson estate, it can turn a once-dependable musical template inside out. That little truism seemed to…
Just as in World War II, France has spent much of the rock era standing on the sidelines. While England and America carved up most of the Western pop empire between themselves, France was a musical irrelevancy: a land of accordions, Maurice Chevalier, rich cuisine and Jerry Lewis fanatics. But…
If Jenny Toomey were like most musicians, she would only talk about her new album, what it was like to make it, what the songs are about, that kind of thing. And she would be entitled: The double-disc Antidote, her solo debut and first album since Tsunami’s A Brilliant Mistake…
In the beginning, there was the accordion. Puro Conjunto, An Album in Words & Pictures (CMAS Books; distributed by University of Texas Press), a collection of writings and artwork about the traditional Tex-Mex dance music, covers virtually every significant artist the scene has produced. But the real star of the…
One of the most encouraging developments in pop music over the last few years has been the emergence of a mini-movement of artsy, bohemian, female R&B singers. This club–which includes Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill and Macy Gray–is fairly disparate, but it’s united by a singer-songwriter’s commitment to individual…
Nate Fowler used to be our neighbor, back when we both lived at the Turtle Dove Apartments on Matilda and McCommas. This was a couple of years ago, when we thought nothing of living in a joint with a busted hot water pipe, no A/C and a constant pool party…
It hardly seems fair, all these years later, to compare and contrast Farrar with ex-Tupelo honey Jeff Tweedy, especially since Tweedy long ago sprinted past his estranged partner and pal, leaving Farrar to choke on the dust of the back roads of which he’s so fond. Tweedy always was the…
The only chore that goes along with being into the Dismemberment Plan–a Washington, D.C., outfit that in about three years has gone from being the oddity of the remarkably goal-oriented D.C. punk scene to perhaps the most creative underground guitar band in the country–is deciding which to admire more. Do…
With the allergy season in its denouement, pharmaceutical companies are turning their attentions to the newest in-vogue ailment: stress and anxiety. Instead of supporting commuters venting via their SUVs, the companies are suggesting that the solution to all of life’s stresses–Whitney Houston rereleases, fourth-quarter losses, biochemical warfare–is just a tiny…
The first thing you don’t need to know about The Strokes is that they are handsome. All five of them–singer Julian Casablancas, guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr., drummer Fabrizio Moretti and bassist Nikolai Fraiture. We’re talking Gap-ad good-looking, with the right haircuts and the right wardrobe and enough…
Travis bassist Dougie Payne is in Detroit. Or rather, the tour bus he’s on with his bandmates–singer-guitarist Fran Healy, guitarist Andy Dunlop and drummer Neil Primrose–is in Detroit. Payne only knows he’s in Detroit (“Motown,” he says, savoring both syllables) because the bus driver just announced it over the loudspeaker…
The setting: The El Rey Theatre, Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, spring 1997. The occasion: a record-release shindig for Boz Scaggs’ Come On Home, his first album since 1994, his third since 1980’s Hits! The crowd: gimme-gimme industry types moving restlessly from first-floor show to second-floor buffet, listening between bites of…
Plainly speaking, the last time Tool put out an album that mattered–and we use that term very loosely–not only was Clinton in the White House, but nobody had even heard of even Monica Lewinsky. Released in 1996, Tool’s pass character (‘198’)nima was heralded for creating an alloy of power metal…
Is emo dead? It seems like just yesterday when bands like the Promise Ring, the Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World were marrying punk’s wily chug to pop’s slippery shine, crafting songs that didn’t sound like Blink-182’s and were better for you too. But consider: The Ring are now…
The album’s worth of songs that The Filthy Reds recorded at home on a computer is worth it just for the song titles alone: “On the Road to Nicestacheville,” “The Holiest Egg Nog I’ve Ever Seen,” “Jimmy Buffett Can Smoke Himself Straight to Hell,” “Surf’s Up, Shithead.” And so on…
If you were hip to such solid powerhouses as Born Against, Moss Icon, the Great Unraveling and Universal Order of Armageddon, then you’d expect Tonie Joy, a former member of all of the above, to know a thing or three about (post) hardcore. As guitarist-vocalist in The Convocation Of…, along…
He’s that guy with the crooked grin, filing away records in the corner of the store. He’s giving you that sly, sideways glance, the bemused look of a kid who’s found a new diversion. You don’t know whether or not to ask for the help you obviously need, but soon…
The woman sitting comfortably in the uncomfortable chair doesn’t have to do anything; she dresses up the office just by being in it. Shrink-wrapped in denim, N’Dambi looks like a star, wearing the casual elegance of the girl-next-door who just happens to be very rich or very famous. She’s not…
It’s been a long time since the pop-music face of heavy rock and roll–metal and its various offshoots, if you’re being picky–was an accurate view of what was going on in its nebulous, if thriving, scene. In fact, the twain really haven’t met since the genre’s inception in the late…
For a guy who had to teach his bad-kid bandmates all the parts of Exile on Main Street–simply because he was the only person who knew them–for Pussy Galore’s infamous gang-bang of the Stones’ classic, and later as one-half of the omnipresent phoenix-rising-out-of-the-ashes-of-rock-history that was the inscrutable Royal Trux, Neil…
After her completely solo, home-recorded debut flightsafety and her small-combo/big-sound follow-up Maps of Tacit, former Crowsdell guitarist and vocalist shannonwright musically opens up her intimate, subdued sound with her latest release, Dyed in the Wool. She’s still playing a kitchen-sink assortment of instruments on it, but she’s joined by like-minded…
