Damien Rice may be the feel-baddest balladeer to find a wide audience since Volkswagen revived Nick Drake. Like his countryman David Gray, Rice specializes in putting the cold, wet feeling of Irish winter onto 2-inch tape and has a similar, if more astringent, vocal style. But Rice’s music is a…

Malcolm Middleton is in a good mood. This isn’t a big deal, really–except that as the brains behind Arab Strap’s music, Middleton isn’t someone you expect to find in high spirits. “Bukowskian bleakness” is the term often employed to describe the mood of Arab Strap, and from their very first…

There’s no reason you should like Leona Naess. After all, taken merely as the sum of her musical influences, Diana Ross’ former stepdaughter seems like a Frankenstein monster stitched together from parts of the Lilith Fair undead: Edie Brickell in the vocal phrasing, earthy-but-ethereal à la solo-era Natalie Merchant, a…

This is a story of the little band that could. There are a few versions of this story, similar and by now familiar. Little band’s four-track demos magically materialize in the hands of so many taste-making buddies, who pass bad copies around like samizdat until at last some savvy label…

So I’m slumming around the downtown Manhattan branch of Tower Records the other day, and I overhear this heated conversation happening the next aisle over. The super-hipster record-store clerk is shaking his head in disbelief as a schlumpy guy in his early 30s demands–demands–to know why he can’t find any…

What with presidential primary season almost upon us, and what promises (one hopes) to be a nail-biting, nasty, brutish and long race for the White House right around the corner, you may be starting to feel a little itch in your votin’ finger. But, alas, unless you maintain primary residence…

As it must, the Strokes’ second LP registers as something of a disappointment. After all, Room on Fire sounds like the Strokes’ debut–and once they remade the world in their own prickly, swivel-hipped image, nothing that sounds vaguely similar to 2001’s Is This It could ever best its trashy, spiteful,…

Anyone who bothered to watch PBS’ recent series on the blues couldn’t help but come to the unhappy conclusion that a once-vital musical style had been strangled by its overweening fans. The series’ directors showed their devotion by preserving the old stuff in pristine curatorial amber, holding it up for…

Rock songs tend to fall into one of two broad categories: the emotional and the ones about emotion. But Death Cab for Cutie songwriter Ben Gibbard and his band straddle the two: On songs such as the title track of Death Cab’s new album Transatlanticism, Gibbard’s reedy tenor expresses both…

Calling punk an attitude has become something of an MTV-generation cliché. Usually it’s offered up as a post-mortem tribute to a musician’s rebelliousness and unvarnished risk-taking musical credibility: Johnny Cash, yo, that guy was punk. Bob Marley. Dee Dee Ramone (duh). But there’s more resonance, now, in punk as an…

Jack White sure does love Holly Golightly. But for most White Stripes fans, the song “Well It’s True That We Love One Another” was the first anyone had heard of her. Who was this tart little miss lobbing rose-scented rejoinders at Jack on the closing track of Elephant? Seriously. White…

“Can we talk about something else?” It’s hard to tell whether Beulah front man Miles Kurosky is joking. After all, he’s only one question into an interview about, among other things, his band’s new album, Yoko, which he’s already confessed is his favorite of the four Beulah has released. Under…

The title of Black Box Recorder’s 1998 debut was England Made Me, and perhaps never before or since has an album title served so utterly and functionally to describe a band’s obsessions. Having lived in London for two years, during a period bracketed by the death of Di on one…

Super Furry Animals’ 2002 album, Rings Around the World, was very loosely a concept album about telecommunication. Or, more specifically, the vagaries of telecommunication–how, in a world filled with the low-grade buzz of infinite, free-floating conversations, enabled by a chain of fiber-optic links that no one save a few specialist…

Everybody loves the Shins. No, seriously–everybody. Take Kevin, for example. All rippling, tattooed arms, head-banger hair and hell-bent-for-leather, don’t-fuck-with-me attitude, Kevin is the backstage bouncer at the Bowery Ballroom and thus something of a New York City indie-rock landmark. And generally speaking, he doesn’t like anyone, unless that someone is…

Emerging in 2001 in a welter of fuzzed-out guitar and excellently effed-up hair, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club could have been mistaken for the second coming of the Jesus and Mary Chain. Likewise anesthetically moody, but adding the extra oomph of sexual come-on in the bass lines and vocals, the band’s…

Warning: Anyone who has towed his or her car to the anti-Strokes bandwagon, read on at your own risk. This article features favorable mention of those friggin’ starlet-dating, fancy-haircut-wearing, no-new-music-making, overexposed pretty boys. Yeah, we know. You’re so sick of the Strokes, you’re sick of being sick of the Strokes…

It’s Friday night and New York City is gearing up for its 13th consecutive weekend of rain. Thirteen weekends, 13 rains: dull, bland, constant rain; drizzles thin as mist; warm sudden gales that strike and retreat like guerrilla warriors. More. But there’s no kidding around about this rain, not tonight:…

You are either for Tindersticks or you are against them. If you are for them, you are very, very for them–and all you need to know about the band’s sixth and latest album, Waiting for the Moon, is that it follows the Trouble Every Day soundtrack on a breadcrumb trail…

What would you do if everything fell apart? Fight or flight? Accept it with a whimper or hold out for a bang? Attempt to pick up the pieces or start over from scratch? Pessimists–or pragmatists–may carry around the latest edition of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, but most people prefer…

Mogwai’s music is a web of contradictions. A band given to grand gestures, yet the music finds its power in subtlety: delicate moments accumulate into something bigger than the sum of those parts–and then, for an instant, the bottom drops out. Multi-instrumental and dense, yet the wall-of-sound is as looming…

“Once upon a time, I was wandering in a magic forest,” says Rooney front man Robert Carmine, in a voice familiar to anyone who ever experienced nursery school story time. “And I ran into an old wise man who gave me a magic bean. And the bean was, like, a…