A snare-cymbal clash fades in to join two guitars–one a simple bass line, the other a recognizable tone of warm distortion sparked by awkwardly picked chords. Over it, an unfamiliar voice breathes some familiarly elliptical lyrics: “Tortured statues someone once held up to the sky/The silver trees and weathervanes mark…
Ever seen a lanky man walk onstage wearing nothing but a pair of corduroy jeans, a battered straw cowboy hat, boots, the lines of a bra on his chest and a handlebar mustache over his lip crudely scrawled in Magic Marker? If you ever caught the Cows during their most…
To your average rock-and-roll fan there is no discernible difference between the Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync–or any other teen-pop outfit for that matter. They’re all a bunch of skinny, middle-class white kids–even though a few have ethnic-sounding names–who shake their lithe and limber bodies to canned synth-pop while singing…
Kool Keith should never worry about finding his niche in a hip-hop world obsessed with marketing and gimmicks, because he’s got the market cornered on total insanity. We’re talking the sort of blue material that sounds like Blowfly and Redd Foxx getting together to tag team Millie Jackson, or Ishmael…
Ever seen a lanky man walk onstage wearing nothing but a pair of corduroy jeans, a battered straw cowboy hat, boots, the lines of a bra on his chest and a handlebar mustache over his lip crudely scrawled in Magic Marker? If you ever caught the Cows during their most…
It’s not so much that longevity gets a bad rap these days as much as it is people seem to have forgotten what it means, much like social drinking and casual sex. It still happens, sure, but it’s pushed to the background and kept hush-hush. In entertainment it’s even worse…
Like George W. Bush, the Los Angeles-by-way-of-San Francisco band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club can’t give it to you straight but looks perplexed by efforts to be savvy. Named for Brando’s gang in The Wild One, this trio echoes Dubya’s political protocol that dresses up Reagan and Big Daddy’s ideas and…
Through a sparse guitar line and viola-and-drum interlude breaks a world-weary voice that intones, “I can’t go back to my favorite bar, ’cause now I’m sure that there’s some lessons that I’m never gonna learn.” In “Back to School,” the second song on Thalia Zedek’s debut solo album, Been Here…
The fervid fever that spawned and defined American Punk was as much a personal response to the blasé culture of the early 1980s as it was a middle finger to late-’70s music. You know the usual suspects: Reagan and his cronies, disco, Frampton Comes Alive. It’s as cliché as a…
Make no mistake about it; Germans know something we don’t. Fans of art-damaged pastiche spit out by German-launched oddities such as Stereo Total, Chicks on Speed, Go Plus and the Notwist know this for a fact. The few American unbelievers were slapped silly when Mouse on Mars came stateside earlier…
Leave it to ex-Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton to give a new meaning to the saying “beating a dead horse.” The guy who’s pop-cult fame was bound by wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with images of Jesus masturbating (that had to be airbrushed out of the band’s Spin cover shoot)…
Though Denton likes to believe it was the home of Texas’ best psych rock in the 1990s, that title actually goes to Houston’s The Mike Gunn. This early-’90s quintet brazenly brandished guitar indulgence that warped more minds in the Lone Star State and beyond since the six-oh days of Josefus,…
Drummer Elvin Jones is an American treasure. The Blue Note regular and John Coltrane titan remains one of the few living holdovers from jazz’s tumultuous 1960s. He’s not only vital for his playing, which delicately mixes modernism’s smoothness with innovative panache, but also for being one of the voices that…
San Diego guitarist John Reis has a résumé that looks like a page from a book of Dada poetry. The guy started laying metal-esque licks for Pitchfork, before moving on to a different sort of twin-guitar mettle in Drive Like Jehu. Along the way he formed the sextet Rocket From…
Whoever it was who first said bad things come in threes–it was probably Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Younger, that poor, stoic sap–had obviously never met Beyoncé Knowles. She’s the undisputed focal point of Houston’s Destiny’s Child, but she knows better than to pass herself off as a solo act. It…
If you’re a member of Dallas’ mildly xenophobic and snooty downtown demimonde, then the last thing you ever say when fishing for something to do is, “Let’s go to Frisco.” We’re not talking about the city by the bay, but the 33,000-strong and growing ‘burb in north, north Dallas, where…
With a voice incisive enough to slice through Kevlar and a body that’s more butter than Land O’ Lakes, Bed-Stuy native Inga Marchand fuses equal parts LL Cool J braggadocio and early Boogie Down Productions’ street sagas as rapper Foxy Brown. And with Broken Silence, her third album, Brown shows…
It ain’t easy being easy listening. With a voice that’s smoother than satin undergarments and equally as alluring, the Nigerian born Helen Folsade Adu to an African father and English mother has the dubious honor of being one of the few mixed-race vocalists in a genre that tolerates camouflaged ethnicity…
There’s something entirely too precious about a young, indie-rock musician with a classic music background. It’s a fact you just can’t shake out of your head. You’ll see some skinny, androgynous, moppy-haired hipster onstage adorned in whatever young-adult Geranimals are fashionably out of season and think–awww, s/he must’ve looked absolutely…
The key that may provide an entryway into the clean, crisp work of painter John Wilcox in Chapel, on view at the Barry Whistler Gallery, is serendipitously found on the wall that serves as the connective route from the gallery’s main space to the smaller gallery in the rear. The…
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…
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…
