After a hiatus of three years, Dallas promotions collective Nice People last month resurrected Knowledge, its regular series of hip-hop concerts. The first go-round kept the spotlight squarely on Dallas. For this second edition, though, Nice People’s reach is extending to bring some Austin musicians to town—though there are still…
Alejandro Escovedo’s acclaimed 2006 album The Boxing Mirror ran the gamut of moods from melancholy to self-doubt, an appropriate response to his hepatitis C-related 2003 brush with death. So how will he react to recovery? Well, by looking back—and rocking out. Escovedo describes his upcoming Real Animal as a retrospective…
Two things that can never be mentioned in the same breath without triggering the gag reflex: “John Waters” and “dump.” I bet I know the first image that juxtaposition conjured in your mind: the infamous closing scene from Waters’ Pink Flamingos. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you probably…
You know how brothas are always chill about everything, and white boys are always all uptight and shit? That social phenomenon seems like a subject rife with comedic possibilities. Perhaps an aspiring young stand-up comic will create an observational routine about this dissimilitude and perform it for Def Comedy Jam…
In a hilariously bad video custom-made for the lite-rock crowd, the city of Richardson has declared its annual mess of mismatched has-beens “North Texas’ Biggest Music Gig,” giving the Melodica Festival yet another kick in the crotch. Big, we’ll grant them. But it’s also perhaps the least essential music fest…
To explain Shibboleth’s instrumental prowess, one could probably point to the fact that they have been the go-to band for Dallas R&B legend Bobby Patterson’s recent live performances—despite the fact that they are not an R&B band—and leave it at that. It’s just proof that guitarist Don Cento, keyboardist Rich…
From sneering vocals straight off Never Mind the Bollocks to the amped-up 12-bar blues progressions lifted from old Chuck Berry and Gene Vincent 45s, everything about The Lash Outs’ debut album screams throwback. It would feel like a grave-digging rip-off if they didn’t attack the songs with so much enthusiasm…
Though it was once chiefly a spot to check out up-and-coming rock bands, The Cavern seems to have found its niche by branching out into hosting local hip-hop and dance events like the weekly Cool Out with DJs Schwa and Big J. Similarly, Saturday’s lineup is sure to be a…
Vampirism, hard time, booze and stress relief through random gunfire: Unknown Hinson is the most rock ‘n’ roll cat to ever dismiss the genre as something “a damn 15-year-old punk can do.” But thanks to his darkly funny, politically incorrect songs and blazing rockabilly riffs, Hinson is gaining popularity with…
In the aftermath of Michael Richards’ infamous N-word meltdown, comedian Paul Mooney vowed to stop using the word that torpedoed the career of his fellow comic, calling on others to join him in banishing the word and claiming that Richards’ hateful tirade “cured” him of the word. It wasn’t a…
Here’s my metaphor for why the American public continues to put up with the Bush administration’s utter incompetence and rejection of constitutional and Geneva Convention rights: olfactory fatigue. If you were forced to live in an outhouse, thanks to this phenomenon, the stench would bother you for less than a…
I can’t help but be suspicious of an event promising free comic books. Every free comic book I ever received was a monumental disappointment. For example, the last thing I wanted to read about after leaving the dentist’s office was tooth maintenance. Yet they had the nerve to hand me…
Though Stumptone calls Fort Worth home, it’s easy to pick up on their Denton heritage. One listen to their long-awaited Gravity Suddenly Released is all it takes to hear how perfectly they straddle the divide between the reeling psychedelia of Denton’s space-rock yesteryear and the chicken-fried folkie roots music of…
The spring and summer festival season has arrived, bringing with it those surreal and inexplicable lineups you can only get when middle-aged civic boosters are tasked with arranging a concert bill. But these events also give local-music heroes the opportunity to boast that they’ve shared a stage with major national…
This weekend, Pizza Hut Park in Frisco will host Edgefest 17, an all-day, three-stage concert featuring some of the biggest names in alt-rock. If you like the bands that KDGE-102.1 FM plays ad nauseam, you’ll absolutely love this lineup. Your only problem will be convincing your parents to shell out…
El Gato and Bridges and Blinking Lights are an excellent pairing—and all the reason you need to show up to this event. Both have released fantastic albums within the past few months; Bridges’ Standing on the Same Stick made this publication’s 2007 Top Ten, and El Gato’s Surrender! is certainly…
Dear whomever scheduled live music at the Fort Worth Main Street Arts Festival: You are a moron. You managed to book two great acts, Dr. John and Son Volt, and filled out the rest of the lineup with a bunch of spares. If you had any sense, you would have…
Kids in rock bands these days can’t play guitar worth shit. It was bad enough in the nineties, when they started covering their guitars with bumper stickers and duct-taping the straps on, like they didn’t care about the finish. But now they don’t even learn how to play. I saw…
There is no weak spot on this amazing, nearly all-local, all-day lineup that the Good folks have assembled. The show belatedly marks the store’s eighth birthday and also falls on “Record Store Day,” a national celebration of independent record stores. At first glance, the lineup’s order seems inexplicable: Why would…
Whether or not they actually know it, every guitarist who has ever used distortion and feedback, or who has augmented an extended solo with showy tricks like playing a guitar behind their head or with their teeth, or bent a note nearly to the string’s breaking point, is aping the…
Bruce Springsteen shouldn’t need an introduction. He’s won 18 Grammy Awards and an Oscar, sold more than 65 million albums and, well, his name is practically synonymous with “working-class,” “Everyman” and “New Jersey” in conversation. Everyone knows The Boss. In his 1980s heyday, it seemed like you couldn’t go half…
The plot summary for The Foreigner, a comic farce by the late playwright Larry Shue, has completely changed how I’m going to approach my next vacation. In the play, Charlie Baker is a shy man who travels with a friend to rural Georgia and pretends to be a foreigner who…
