Anybody who caught Prince’s tour last fall witnessed two small miracles of nature. One was a 42-year-old man cram his petite, wiry frame into suits, capes and ankle-length coats that looked like leftovers from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’s wardrobe while dancing around in stilt-like high heels, inciting every future…
Chomsky will unveil Onward Quirky Soldiers, its follow-up to 1999’s A Few Possible Selections for the Soundtrack of Your Life, on August 18, with a shindig at Trees that will also include performances by The Deathray Davies and Legendary Crystal Chandelier. But if you want an advance listen to one…
Now that Coldplay and Travis have made a dent here in the states, we can certainly expect more Brit melancholia. With that in mind, meet Turin Brakes, who follows pretty much the same acoustic folk-rock blueprint on its debut, The Optimist LP. A humorless south London version of Tenacious D,…
The cover of the White Stripes’ third release depicts the Detroit duo surrounded by shadowy Ninja assassins who, as the last page of the CD booklet reveals, turn out to be friendly members of a media circus. Could this be a not-so-subtle indication of how Jack and Meg White feel…
The title on the cover of Timo Ellis’ first solo effort is The Enchanted Forest of Timo Ellis, while the one on the spine of the disc reads The Enchanting Schizophrenia of Timo Ellis. This is a telling detail for an album (four-song EP, actually) as all over the place…
Practice isn’t supposed to begin for a few more minutes, so [DARYL] bassist Jeff Parker sits on one of the two couches outside of the room the band rents at Universal Rehearsal, smoking a Winston and ashing into an empty Dr Pepper can he found in the hallway. Leaning into…
Sunny is hardly the word you’d expect to come out of the mouth of a metal man. You know the type. Erratically long hair. Painted-on leather pants. Studded wristbands. Guitars played while standing with feet as far apart as limbs allow. Names with umlauts over vowels just because it looks…
A year ago, all Bryce Avary wanted was a record contract. He had just released a five-song EP, under the name The Rocket Summer, and he used it as a calling card, sending it to every label he’d heard of and a few that he hadn’t. Avary was just finishing…
In the last few golden weeks of Napster’s doomed existence, I was file-sharing like, um, it was going out of business. I couldn’t get enough, mostly of dance remixes of Top 40 tunes I had no interest in paying import prices for: the Neptunes’ urbane reading of Sade’s “By Your…
“Linden Boulevard represent, represent/Tribe Called Quest represent, represent/When the mic is in my hand, I’m never hesitant/My favorite jam back in the day was ‘Eric B. for President.'” When A Tribe Called Quest MC Phife Dawg dropped call-and-response lines as agile and tactile as the above on “Steve Biko (Stir…
Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings made a compelling argument for steering youth in the direction of becoming doctors and lawyers and such with their 1977 cover of Ed Bruce’s “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” They warned about the dangers of letting them “pick guitars and…
Though D.C.’s Rites of Spring is often cited as the ground zero of emo proper, Baltimore’s Lungfish–and lyricist-vocalist Daniel Higgs–provides the verbal altar to which the genre aspires. On its 1989 debut, Necklace of Heads, Lungfish sets the powerful wordplay bar high, and it’ll be an eon before another song-poet…
He sounds like any musician over the phone, like any burnt-to-a-crisp rock star who spent the previous night burning down the shed. He is, by turns, thoughtful and distracted, animated and weary. He crunches on a cup full of ice as he contemplates his answers, which are never inarticulate and…
Anybody who’s ever spent any amount of time with musicians knows that one of their biggest complaints is finding a place to play live. Certain clubs won’t book their bands because they don’t draw. Petty rivalries get blown out of proportion between neighboring scenes. (Hello, Dallas and Denton.) Rock clubs…
Joe Pernice says he hates his life, sings about suicide and flaming plane wrecks and sees more broken hearts than a bag of crushed Valentine’s Day candy, and the funny thing is, you might not notice at first. Almost every one of his songs makes Morrissey’s entire back catalog sound…
Apparently, Lift to Experience’s debut album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, has sold out of its inaugural 5,000-copy pressing in the U.K. (where its label, Bella Union, is based) and Europe. Still no word on a domestic distributor for the disc, and we hope no one is scared off by Crossroads’, uh,…
It’s possible that a sense of humor has joined common sense on the endangered species list of American foibles. Not that anybody’s noticed, mind you, but when a pair of wise-cracking DJs get canned for a practical joke–and not a very original one at that–well, it may be time to…
Contrary to the social mores that marked the era, the British demimonde found a way to take the starch out of its collars with the confessional smut novel that Victorian England perfected. Sure, France likes to believe that its raunch is saucier, but the French are far too sexually comfortable…
It’s a little before 1 p.m. in Portland when Jise, one of the MCs in the Arsonists, answers the phone in his hotel room. There’s a fog in his voice that betrays that he’s probably closer to unconsciousness than consciousness. “I’m just waking up, man,” he cracks, his voice creaking…
It’s hard to imagine a more self-effacing guitar hero than Doug Martsch. The leader and driving force of Built to Spill–Boise, Idaho’s greatest claim to musical immortality–Martsch brings to mind Robert Christgau’s old line (in reference to T-Bone Burnett) about being unable to resist a humble man with a proud…
Kathie Lee Gifford must be fuming. Pay some Honduran kids to earn an honest living cranking out clothes for Wal-Mart back in 1996 and you’re called a child-labor pariah. Sign their American counterparts to multimillion-dollar record deals a few years later and make them sweat to canned synth-pop tracks and…
Last week, we received a bit of good news for all street-level pharmaceutical suppliers in the greater Austin area, and maybe a few around here. Seems that after five years and one completed and abandoned album, Mr. Peppermint’s son, Gibby Haynes, and his band, the Butthole Surfers, will finally have…
