Inside Studio Three, a jowly, bulldog-faced musician saws out a few notes on the violin, then pauses to greet a colleague who, despite the day’s post-rain warmth, enters wearing an enormous checkered scarf. They’re here at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles to record string parts for Elliott Smith’s new album,…
About 30 minutes into the interview, Dave Gibson stops, frowns, shrugs, and lets out a slight moan. He is in the middle of explaining why it has been four years since his band, Slowpoke, has released an album, and suddenly it has struck him that perhaps he’s burying a story…
Shellac’s second album, the brand-new Terraform, is the sound of Steve Albini going soft. Relatively speaking, that is: Fifteen years after he started his career with Big Black, Albini’s vocals are still choked screams, his guitar still sounds like an army of power tools, and his idea of a great…
Too good to care Starting at the End The Calways Red Label Records Here’s where Todd Deatherage grows up and moves out of the house, where a young rock-and-roll band makes a record bigger and better than perhaps even the band ever imagined. Nothing the Calways did before this hinted…
Jimmy Hoffa seems like a more plausible candidate for a comeback than Vanilla Ice. The once and former Robert Van Winkle briefly ruled the world in 1990 with “Ice Ice Baby,” the most successful rap single of all time to that point. But the vicious backlash that struck him shortly…
Dance this mess around Decksandrumsandrockandroll Propellerheads DreamWorks Tomorrow’s sound is already yesterday’s detritus; the electronic revolution is over, and still the singer-songwriters and long-hairs are standing, laughing at the empty dance floors and emptier cash registers. Electronica, an already archaic term created by Spin in a desperate last stab at…
Here is what Jeff Mangum is like: He is friendly. He stammers sometimes, as if struggling to find the right words to express his ideas. One imagines that he is not entirely comfortable coping with conventional situations, conversations, ideas. He talks about how he only recently began to read with…
George goes to high school Hagfish Hagfish Honest Don’s Lame-Ass Recordings The second track, “Band,” says it all and more: Were Hagfish, the band’s third album, a CD single featuring just that one song, it would have been more than enough. “Band” is perhaps the most honest, most fully realized,…
U.K. snubs This is Hardcore Pulp Island Records England’s failure to establish a rock-and-roll stronghold in the States, Oasis very aside for now, can be attributed to an unapologetic ethnocentric bent: Such blokes as Oasis’ Noel Gallagher, Blur’s Damon Albarn, and especially Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker write songs for and about…
When it comes to the complex machinery of the modern recording studio, it’s hardly a stretch to suggest that Spiritualized auteur Jason Pierce is as much a master of his domain as Phil Spector, George Martin, and Brian Eno were of theirs. It’s ironic, then, to find him stuck in…
“South by Southwest is a little like Fantasy Island. It’s a place where dreams come true.” The lead singer-guitarist utters those words like a child, his voice so high it could touch the stars. He performs for a packed house, a few hundred early-morning revelers who’ve seen Saturday turn into…
Nancy Wilson came onto the music scene in the 1960s, a jazz-singing paragon of sultry sophistication and class, a master of the smoldering torch song tempered with cool. Her songs sizzled with emotion–dishing the faithless lover with plaintive cries of unrequited love, confessing the perils of romance in storybook narrative,…
Don’t break what ain’t fixed Few modern songwriters invite cliches like Steve Earle does: He’s the modern outlaw, the man on the run from the cops and his demons, the guy too country for rock and too rock for country. It’s somehow fitting that Earle always gets described in such…
Dude and Juvey–even now, their names sound made-up, like characters in some B-grade, blackboard-jungle teen exploitation film made in 1958; they would have played slicked-back bad boys, leather-clad rockers, rebels without a…well, you know. But these are real people and their real names: Dude Kahn is tall and imposing, wearing…
Hooked on a feeling So often, the best songs are the simplest songs. Anyone who doesn’t believe that should go out and buy any of the Ramones’ first three records and listen to that band turn three chords and a handful of words into pure perfection. Sometimes, all it takes…
My, how time crawls. It seems like only yesterday when we first heard that a 15-year-old kid from Greenville was going to save rock and roll. Perhaps we first read about it in The New Yorker; maybe it was in Billboard or some other trade publication. But we heard all…
Horton hears a why Space Heater Reverend Horton Heat Interscope Records Rockabilly died a quick death because it was born full-grown, and it had nowhere to go but six feet under. Those who outlived the music evolved beyond it, and those who didn’t were carried out in the same coffin;…
The prevailing wisdom is this: that rock music–as played with guitars, bass, and drums–has its charms, but also its limitations; that there’s only so much you can do with those instruments without becoming repetitive and/or pedestrian; and that in order to be intelligent, rock-oriented music must look outward, toward new…
Fade away Never to Be Forgotten The Bobby Fuller Four Del-Fi Records El Paso Rock, Vol. 2 Bobby Fuller Norton Records Bobby Fuller’s less a legend and more a one-hit wonder, a man who scored a single Top 10 hit in 1966–“I Fought the Law”–then, shortly after, died a mysterious…
The phone call finally arrives around 6 p.m., four hours late. The connection crackles and hisses as though it resents the human intrusion; Tito Larriva’s voice on the other end sounds hollow, distant. The imagination reels. This is, after all, the primary orchestrator behind what is possibly the meanest rock…
They’re crawling out of Dixie like the zombied remains of long-dead Confederate soldiers. Legions of third-generation, Deep South/Gulf Coast pop bands such as Cowboy Mouth, Sister Hazel, Memory Dean, and Better Than Ezra have been slowly infiltrating American radio with a twisted optimism that could come, really, from no place…
“They just found a syringe full of cocaine here.” This, my introduction to the more off-color side of singer-songwriter David Garza, is delivered via a muddy answering-machine message called in from a Texas nightclub that will remain nameless. Curiously, the second thing out of Garza’s mouth is a rebuttal of…
