The Artist Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (Arista/NPG Records) The Artist Formerly Known releases more albums in a year than most artists do in a lifetime — and, as he told MTV just last week, there’s plenty more in the vaults where that came from. Like a survivalist, the man…
Buddy Mohmed American Bedouin (Blue Cedars Records) Chicago-born, Dallas-based Buddy Mohmed is perhaps the finest jazz upright-bass player in Texas. He’s also a formidable jazz guitarist — particularly in his unique explorations of traditional Greek and Arab melodic themes, Mohmed’s trademark turf. American Bedouin is his debut, but these themes…
Ben Harper may look like a hipster jazzbo who just stepped out of a Gap khakis ad, but don’t let appearances fool you: This guy is a stone-cold hippie, and the vast majority of his sizable and growing following hails from the Grateful Dead/H.O.R.D.E./Phish school. This is to say, the…
Well, he’s got a band with him this time, in a venue he’s always haunted solo. Some fans may like that, and some may not, but anyone who caught Radney Foster with a full backing band last May at the Gypsy Tea Room can confirm that Foster with a supporting…
Of all the big, loud, stoopid rawk that’s crawled out of the Northwest this decade, the Supersuckers can reasonably lay claim to the title of proudest Luddites. Until a few years ago, the Seattle (by way of Tucson) quartet gleefully spat up a series of country-fried boogie-metal platters, each replete…
Dan “The Automator” Nakamura laughs when he recalls how his DJ career ended before it really began. The memory’s probably funnier now than it was then, especially since his latest album So…How’s Your Girl? — a partnership with another reformed DJ, Prince Paul, under the name Handsome Boy Modeling School…
Stereolab has often been maligned by critics for being too artsy and elite, and not without good reason. After all, well, it is. Many of the group’s songs are sung in French, and the lyrics frequently allude to Freud and Jung’s thoughts on psychoanalysis. But the criticism the band has…
Andre Williams doesn’t mince words. He doesn’t have time for that. He’s seen a promising R&B career go up in smoke, he’s fallen victim to drug addiction, and he’s spent more time hustling his way out of the gutter than he’d care to remember. So when this resuscitated soul man…
The kids file quietly into their seats, as though being led to a gruesome, inevitable fate. They are quiet, respectful, the shuffle of their feet the only sound echoing through the majestic concert hall. “Man, I hope this is cool,” whispers one bespectacled teenage boy to another. “Dude, it will…
Scene, heard As was previously reported, the pair of shows Tripping Daisy was supposed to play at the Curtain Club on November 12 and 13 will not happen. Instead, both nights have been changed to benefits for the family of guitarist Wes Berggren, who died on October 27. According to…
Beck Midnite Vultures (Interscope Records) Beck Hansen’s latest personality is his best joke yet, as this gawky-yet-funky white boy makes himself over as a smooth-talking, hard-partying sex machine, accompanied by the live equivalent of the Dust Brothers’ waxploitation soundtracks. Hiding behind gibberish less often than on previous releases, Beck tries…
Johnnie Taylor Gotta Get The Groove Back (Malaco) It should come as no surprise that the tracks with horns work better than those fleshed out (yeah, like a skeleton) with keyboard arrangements. The man may be from the old school — says so right there on track No. 2 (“I’m…
Atom and His Package Atom is Adam Goren, a slightly nerdy 24-year-old Philadelphian with an affinity for the metric system and a master’s degree in neuroscience. His Package is a Yamaha QY700 sequencer, a computer-keyboard arrangement programmed with more than 500 musical intruments, only a few of which Goren seems…
TLC Peering from the cover like a troika of Kraftwerk Smurfs, TLC followed up the gazillion-selling CrazySexyCool earlier this year with Fanmail, a disc pleasantly front-loaded with precocious attempts to goose the sometimes staid R&B crossover market. While it was still well-rooted in the kind of pop/hip-hop/smooth-R&B aesthetic that’ll rack…
Unity Church of Christianity is, perhaps, situated in an odd location for a place of worship: a few blocks north of most of the bars on Lower Greenville, directly across the street from a nondescript gas station, a few hundred feet south of another conglomerate of bars and restaurants. It’s…
They call themselves Hot Club of Cowtown, are based out of Austin, and play a vigorous acoustic mixture of Western swing and 1920s hot jazz. So one might expect that this trio’s genesis was sparked by some primal musical experience in an old Texas dancehall, or the Left Bank of…
After coordinating countless benefits for Denton’s Good/Bad Art Collective, Chris Weber is used to dealing with unique situations, controlling them as much as possible. For example, Inflicted Music — the benefit that partly inspired Weber’s best-known creation, Rock Lottery, three years ago — featured Centro-matic’s Will Johnson playing his songs…
Barley House presents its annual Gramfest on November 5, a celebration of the life, music, and Nudie suits of former Byrd and Flying Burrito Brother Gram Parsons. Reed Easterwood, Meredith Miller, Lucky Pierres, the Bradfords, Ridgerunners, Shaggy and the Flamin’ Grammies, and Pat McKanna will perform Parsons’ music from 9…
Fiona Apple When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts… (Clean Slate/Epic Records) Fiona Apple sure doesn’t make it easy to like her. She’s got a dead man’s sense of humor (surely someone told her long ago that frowning makes ya look sexy), was singing her sour-dour love songs when she was…
LeAnn Rimes LeAnn Rimes (Curb Records) October 26, 1999: Perhaps stung by the criticism that her “Purple Rain” cover on last year’s presumptuously titled Sittin’ on Top of the World made her sound like an aging and incoherent drag queen, LeAnn Rimes releases an album of country standards. (Among the…
Don Byron The 40-year-old clarinetist would no doubt hate such a description, but Don Byron’s new album, Romance With the Unseen, is far and away his most, ah, normal disc to date — normal, meaning accessible; normal, meaning familiar. It’s hardly a knock — the record is a thing of…
Momus San Franciscan Noah Brill is 3 years old and famous. In a way. Last year, British Bach-obsessed and dirty-minded pop auteur Momus released his third album, The Little Red Songbook, which featured a song titled “Walter Carlos,” meant as a tribute to the ’60s Switched on Bach pioneer. Carlos,…
