The obvious song Up Up Up Up Up Up Ani DiFranco Righteous Babe There’s a tendency in the rock press to revere Ani DiFranco for all the things that merely surround her music: the self-contained record label, the is-she-or-ain’t-she-queer? thing that obsesses her fans, the voice-of-a-new-generation hype that crops up…
Four years ago, I briefly met Peter Guralnick at a book signing in Memphis, Tennessee. At the time, Guralnick–one of the few great chroniclers of American music–was basking in considerable acclaim for Last Train to Memphis, the first volume of his Elvis Presley biography. The book, arguably the first legit…
The BMW is parked downstairs, and Henry Rollins makes no apologies about it. He survived punk rock to become a taxpayer, a landowner, a commercial pitchman, a published writer, and a publisher himself. When all of that caused the media to anoint him as an icon–a brawny, tattooed thinker, the…
Nobody beats the Wiz Add On! Ghetto Fame-Us Load Zone Central Recordings The first voice you hear on Add On!, Ghetto Fame-Us’ debut album, is that of KNON-FM DJ EZ Eddie D, the mellower than yellow host of the area’s only underground hip-hop show, Knowledge Dropped, Lessons Taught. His presence…
Quiet, disturb My ears are ringing but my heart’s ok Captain Audio Last Beat Records The five-song demo tape Captain Audio was hawking at its live shows last year was as good as almost every other local release of 1998, splitting the difference between art and rock with more pop…
From the gut-wrenching moan of the Delta blues to the brassy fire of New Orleans jazz, the Mississippi River has birthed some of this country’s finest homegrown sounds. But for self-appointed hipsters in the coastal megalopolises of New York or Los Angeles, where voguish chart-toppers train their mikes toward bottom-line…
Waltzing’s for dreamers Sam Prekop Sam Prekop Thrill Jockey Knock Knock Smog Drag City What the hell happened to “indie rock”? A decade ago, the phrase implied loud, brilliant and brainless all at once, hearts worn on the same tattered sleeves upon which young men wiped their snot noses. But…
As with the year’s new records, 1998’s rock-and-roll reading found small pleasures coming from unexpected places, while the much-touted Big Events were ushered into the world with a resounding plop echoing throughout the lavatory. As we’ve been doing every year since, ah, OK, 1999, the Dallas Observer will forgo the…
It’s a hard-knock life? You got that right. But one thing: Don’t bring no Beastie Boys around here. Maybe the only good thing Hilton Als ever wrote in The New Yorker was when he said not so long ago that all the brothers and sisters in the crowd just stared…
March, 1985. Lankershim Boulevard, nearing the edge of industrial North Hollywood. The Palomino. On stage: Lone Justice, pounding out a Parton-meets-punk mutation of country-rock that had seduced an entire city of music observers. The Next Big Thing. They play stomping blue-collar tales (“Working Late”) and brokenhearted weepers (“Don’t Toss Us…
This is not the complete story of Will Clay. There are too many gaps here for it to be the whole truth and nothing but. That is because so many of Will Clay’s old friends and bandmates have long since left Dallas, disappeared without leaving forwarding addresses. And it is…
The process is nothing if not scientific: At the end of every year, we contact each contributor to our music section and ask him/her to submit a roster of the 10 most overrated, mediocre, or generally offensive records released that annum. In order. These individual tallies are then painstakingly transcribed…
In the Letters section of this week’s Dallas Observer appears a missive from Jim “Reverend Horton Heat” Heath, blasting me for hinting in a recent Street Beat item that Reverend Horton Heat was recently dropped from Interscope Records because the label was unhappy with quality and quantities moved. Heath demanded…
1. Beastie Boys, Hello Nasty (Grand Royal) 2. Radiohead, OK Computer (Capitol) 3. Prodigy, The Fat of the Land (Maverick) 4. Beck, Mutations (DGC) 5. Crystal Method, Vegas (Outpost) 6. Robert Earl Keen, Walking Distance (Arista) 7. Pat Green, Here We Go (Pat Green Records) 8. Billy Bragg & Wilco,…
Only days ago, the mysterious CD appeared on a colleague’s desk here at the newspaper, buried beneath piles of publicists’ releases and other kept detritus. No one knew how long it had been there, where it came from, what the hell it was. The cover, featuring a nattily clad monkey…
Turns us on Floor 13 Floor 13 Self-released Overlooked and underrated are two apt descriptions surrounding Floor 13. Too bad, then, since these boys’ powerhouse live show and new-wave-meets-glam tunes could easily be pulling in some of the city’s biggest audiences. Surely all those displaced tomorrowpeople and Tripping Daisy fans…
Michael Corcoran Makes Stuff Up As a critic gets older — and this one is 43 — certain tasks become more difficult, like trying to show any interest whatsoever in the latest R.E.M. release. But other activities become a breeze, such as making a year-end list of the 10 best…
The best record to arrive in the mail this year will not even hit stores until February 23, 1999: Sleater-Kinney’s The Hot Rock. It possesses what 99.93 percent of every single record released in 1998 does not–that intangible insinuation of hanging-on-by-a-thread desperation, the sound of everything falling apart, the sensation…
This story was to have been about only one thing: how the soundtrack to a marginal 1965 television special has become one of the best-selling holiday albums, one that grows more popular with each passing year. It was to have simply been a love letter to A Charlie Brown Christmas–a…
Life begins on the stage Transistor Blast XTC TVT Records God almighty, four discs of XTC live–two consisting of material recorded for British DJ John Peel’s show from 1979 to ’89, one of random live shows dating from 1978 and ’79, the last taken entirely from a December 1980 concert…
Redrumm Recordz’s Pikahsso never misses an opportunity to plug his label’s upcoming release schedule, steering every query back to the future. If you were to ask the 28-year-old rapper what day it is, he’d probably tell you Kabaal has an album coming out in a few weeks, followed by full-lengths…
Gone, daddy, gone Lo-Fi Lorraine & Her Bag of Tricks Slick 57 R Records I never really understood rockabilly’s inability to stay good and dead. One slap-bass, hillbilly-rock rave-up way too often sounds like the next, something even Carl Perkins figured out around the time he discovered he was a…
