The sound is as flowing and wide-open as the tail of a comet, whooshing through a pastiche of found sounds and percussion–some electronic, some organic–sounding for all the world like elevator music from a lift somewhere past Pluto. It’s hard to tell who’s making the music on the darkened stage,…
Two women Rivers Elizabeth Wills Crystal Clear Sound Cult of Odd Hairstick Twitch Music With her new album Rivers, Elizabeth Wills builds on her first album, Going Home, working from a pure folk blueprint that recalls “Chelsea Morning”-era Joni Mitchell crossed with Shawn Colvin. Acoustic guitars set the tone, supported…
Drummer’s choice Mickey Hart’s Mystery Box Mickey Hart’s Mystery Box Rykodisc Former Grateful Dead drummer/percussionist Mickey Hart does good with the first post-Garcia release from a member of the Grateful Dead, turning in an effort that is surprisingly accessible and avoids both cloning the Dead and the sometimes-relentless ethnomania that…
The quick and the dead Hammer Zoe RCA Records Dedicated to the One I Love Linda Ronstadt Elektra Records London-born Zoe Pollock rediscovers the amazing fit enjoyed by a certain sort of English female vocal with the hybrid framework of rock and blues. Like Maggie Bell before her, Zoe has…
In the media-intensive, market-savvy world we live in today, the growth cycle of pop bands has been steadily accelerated in the name of commercial return: Like the foresters who oversee the genetically altered pulpwood trees of East Texas, music execs want to grow ’em fast and move ’em out. Few…
Before and after Beheaded Bedhead Trance Syndicate Tie You Up/Who is Brad? Stranger Than Fiction Hub City Productions Post-punk, post-rock, hell–Bedhead is nearly post-apocalyptic in the open, isolated vibe it conjures up on Beheaded, an album of mood music for a Twilight Zone episode set in the desert, all long…
It’s a job not unlike that of the village idiot–the gifted, insightful singer-songwriters in pop music whose genius sometimes leads them along the road of excess. They get out there, spaz out, and we all feel better; perhaps we even learn something. Their efforts alternate between inspirational and insipid, troubling…
Hey, man, there’s no such thing as bad press–at least that’s what critics say whenever they run into somebody they’ve recently trashed. In the case of the fourth-annual SolstiCelebration, a drum-driven romp through a welter of progressive/alternative/New Agey signifiers heralding the arrival of the longest day of the year, spokesperson…
Dancing in the floodlights Signpost albums–you come across them at particularly significant periods in your life, and forever afterwards they invoke, they stand for, those times. For those who were (post-)adolescent in 1976 when Joan Armatrading released her self-titled debut, the album will always be the soundtrack to youthfully earnest…
Artists Alan Govenar and Kaleta Doolin aren’t the most obvious pair: While he speaks with the rapid cadences of his Boston boyhood, hers are the measured rhythms of a native Dallasite. He projects an active, external hustle–a sense of always leaning toward you–while she suggests hidden currents, processes that continue…
Some summers it seems that there are more blues players in Dallas than mosquitoes, all buzzing and shuffling along the same wide and worn Chicago groove. Mike Morgan’s been there, too, and he wonders if part of the problem isn’t that musicians tend to live so much by listening. “Heck,”…
I sing the body electric Blessed or Damned Dale Watson HighTone Records Semi Crazy Junior Brown Curb Records Somewhere out past the countrypolitan glow of big-city lights, past even the Fogelberg-fertilized fields of Young Country, there’s a place where the beer lights shine preternaturally bright and the pool balls send…
Marvin “Smokey” Montgomery is a politely unassuming man, small in a way that suggests concentrated vitality rather than size. His 83 years show neither on his waist nor in his eyes. There’s little to suggest that this grandfather had once walked with musical legends, or that he was among those…
The next best thing Live at the Vortex Rotten Rubber Band Heat Wave Few local bands do as good a job of transporting an audience into the sweaty, smoky heart of a weekend night as the Rotten Rubber Band. Passing out percussion instruments and encouraging the crowd to participate, they…
