What will ultimately save Bratmobile from the riot girl ghetto of early ’90s commercial nostalgia can be summed up in one word: balls. While their original peers were shrill and dogmatic, Bratmobile was too immediate in learning not to give a fuck. The three-woman band–formed in Eugene, Oregon, lead by…

FOR: “It took a lot of work to be the ass that I am,” sings Isaac Brock on Modest Mouse’s latest release, The Moon & Antarctica, and quite a few people would agree with him. The work has paid off: After two albums on Calvin Johnson’s K Records label, and…

It’s a late night at Nomad Studios in Carrollton, where The Paper Chase’s John Congleton works as a sound engineer. At the moment, he’s sitting in a studio with one of his clients, gospel popster Kirk Franklin; Congleton, who worked with Franklin on 1997’s God’s Property, is acting as an…

It starts — surprisingly, frustratingly — with a question of etiquette, after half a dozen calls to the appropriate cell-phone number at the appropriate time, and the only thing picking up is a voice-mail greeting. Is it proper to leave a message at the end of each call, or hang…

Forget about all the other summer tours making their way across the country in convoys of plush buses and overloaded trailers. The real show of the summer is hitting the road in vans a few thousand miles past serviceable, stopping at clubs instead of amphitheaters. In an attempt to use…

The Makers In the past few months, The Makers have gotten unprecedented hype even though their act–like most of those that get relatively huge in the world of college radio, record-store employees, and alternative newsweeklies–is neither new nor particularly spectacular. Beginning early in the ’90s, they put out some wild…

Last July, kids from all over the world flocked to Olympia, Washington — a city with a population half that of Denton — solely to see music, specifically the bands performing at the semi-regular Yoyo A Go Go festival. But even without a festival to spur them on, kids still…

Sean Na Na, Ted Leo My father, a Cuban national and Dallas Public Schools educator, claims that the best indicator of mastery of American English is proper use of the word “cute”. Minneapolis trio Sean Na Na is cute: cute in the most complimentary, most rock-and-roll way. They’re as cute…

Last spring in Denton, Gregg Foreman — long-legged and wolf-voiced frontman of The Delta 72 — won my heart, along with that of everyone else in the audience at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios. He sang in smooth, guttural growls, played a mean slide guitar, and owned the stage as if…

Unless you’re a local punk enthusiast who perhaps spent some time studying the collective works of Rudolf Rocker and his “anarcho-syndicalism” posse, you most likely have not heard, nor heard of, Chad Ferman. Yet he has done plenty to keep his fragile flame burning around here. Perhaps a handful of…

It’s been a full six months since Swivel and Blush last played together. Simply billed as the July 3 Show, it was the last of several set up by the kids in the bands and their friends at the Bishop Arts District’s Oak Cliff Coffee House. With vocals sent out…