The biggest knock on the Keys’ 2006 major-label debut, Magic Potion, was its lack of innovation. That can’t be said about the band’s new disc, Attack & Release, which remains steadfast in its blues allegiance while expanding the Akron, Ohio, duo’s territorial reach. Tastefully done, it’s undoubtedly a Black Keys…

On its 2003 debut, The Decline of British Sea Power, U.K. indie-rockers British Sea Power laid buzz-saw guitars on top of an expansive, psych-tinged background. The band’s 2005 follow-up, Open Season, sacrificed some of that steely bite for strings and swooning textures. Without jagged guitar slashes propelling them, the songs…

It’s always darkest before the dawn. Or so the music industry has been reassuring itself lately. You really can’t blame record companies for that whiff of optimism: Over the past few years, they’ve been bleeding like a hemophiliac with a razor fetish. The numbers are indeed grim. SoundScan figures for…

Billy Joe Shaver and I have been talking for about 20 minutes when I bring up his son Eddy, who died of a heroin overdose in 2000—on New Year’s Eve. He passed away just more than a year after Shaver’s wife and mother both succumbed to cancer. Then in 2001,…

Pat Sullivan may have left Oneida behind to form Oakley Hall, but he didn’t abandon their garage-psych experimentation, only recast it in Americana. The result is something like Blue Cheer mugging Jerry Garcia in the bathroom while Crazy Horse watches the door. It’s twang that’s not afraid to get its…

Au Revoir Simone’s synth-pop is as gorgeous as the three brunettes that make up the band. The Casio-centric outfit from Brooklyn began in 2003 when Erika Forster met Annie Hart on a train from Vermont to New York. Delivering lustrous harmonies, Au Revoir Simone has expanded the sonic palette on…

With stunning production from old rival Marley Marl, KRS-One delivers a sharp retort to Nas’ recent proclamation that Hip-Hop Is Dead—but not without kicking some dirt on gangsta culture. The highlights on this 12-track disc are many, including “Nothing New,” in which the Teacher delivers his indictment via a Rasta…

It’s been four years since Fountains of Wayne’s last studio album, but the wait has been more than worth it, because FOW produces incredibly well-constructed pop. Besides a gift for hummable melodies, the group’s bite-size vignettes of middle-class angst (think John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom) reveal a novelist’s eye for detail…

His dad, novelist Larry McMurtry, bought him his first guitar when he was 7, and his mother, an English professor, taught him how to play it, but even so, the acorn resides close to the tree. James McMurtry’s country-tinged roots rock is keyed to his facility with words, his insights…

James Murphy rescues intelligent dance music from the oblique, humorless IDM crowd, forging a canny, self-conscious blend of new wave nostalgia, skittering breaks and wry wit. (He did, after all, almost write for Seinfeld.) Murphy’s second full-length release is more luxurious than his debut, apparently the result of spending even…

It’s been a month to forget for the Dixie Chicks–and for everyone else involved in country music radio. Owners of a No. 1 country single heading into March, the Chicks now find themselves in a shit storm thanks to that well-covered offhand comment about President Bush at a concert in…

Martin Sexton is rare, not so much for his musicianship, for good musicians are a dime a dozen, but because he’s an old-fashioned performer–selling the audience not only with the music, but the passion and energy behind it. Perhaps it can be attributed to his naturally impetuous and rebellious nature,…

Guitar heroes have always been more the province of heavy metal than punk, where the aesthetic of self-conscious primitivism and “loud fast rules” left little room for solos. There are exceptions, of course, and one of them is Rick Sims, the six-string scoundrel who leads his band of hard-rocking desperados,…

Expanding on the sparse, understated pop of his solo debut, In The Sun, Prewitt’s 1999 follow-up, White Sky, upped the ante with majestic, meticulous compositions tinged in a melancholia linked thematically and emotionally to the autumnal equinox by cuts such as “Summer’s End” and “Final Season.” A sweet tantalizing treat,…

A natural-born romantic, Ben Kweller’s new album, Sha Sha, bubbles over with the solfège of love–the bop-bops, the do-do, do-dos and the ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bas that give voice to the heart’s joy and yearning. From piano ballads to acoustic pop to raved-up rockers, there’s a spirited innocence on his album too often…

Genuflecting at the altar of Black Sabbath, English doom-metal trio Electric Wizard delivers monumental, glacial riffs that roar with enough post-apocalyptic fury to earn it the title of the heaviest band in the land. Deep Purple’s Roger Glover once said, “Heavy isn’t about volume; it’s about attitude,” and he could…

Given the contrarian nature of the underground, it was inevitable that naïve indie rockers who described their music interests as “anything but country” end up drawn to their genre blind spot. Distancing themselves from Nashville, they’ve affixed an alt- prefix to these rootsy forays, but it’s a meaningless misnomer that…

Shannon Wright’s as much an actress as a singer, a director as much as a musician, with exquisitely crafted songs suffused with such drama and intensity that they’re best described as chamber theater. There’s an eerie expressionistic quality about her music, from the trembling tympani and haunting sustains of the…

How does one embark on a career as a rock troubadour? Perhaps it’s by following the backwoods roads from one nowhere burg to another, crossing the fields like an itinerant ballplayer and tossing off heartfelt songs like Johnny Appleseed until they finally take root with the strangers along the way…

Like the clattering, asthmatic wheeze of the industrial revolution as it slowly relinquished influence to a burgeoning new age, The Faint’s music resurrects the vacuous bounce of ’80s synth-pop to express the unsatisfying rumble of an increasingly mechanized, impersonal world. The insistence of their gloomy, retro-groove recalls The Cure flavored…