When in doubt, there’s always the weather. Pete Yorn, for example, doesn’t have much else to complain about. The singer-songwriter’s debut LP, Musicforthemorningafter, earned both gold record certification and critical hosannas for its polished, Bruce Springsteen-meets-Jeff Buckley guitar rock. Yorn even looks the part, what with that mop of dark…

What with White Stripes a month on shelves, and the Rapture and Radiohead soon to come, 2003 is proving a year heavy on the “hotly anticipated.” Among these, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ first full-length, Fever to Tell, has likely caused its fair share of bated breath-related injuries, and now that it’s…

With a face as pretty as his songs, former Lemonheads front man Evan Dando earned a reputation as the Mazda Miata of rock: sexy and utterly lightweight. Seven years after the Lemonheads ended with a whimper, Dando’s long-awaited solo debut, Baby I’m Bored, forces a reappraisal: It makes you want…

There are a few tempting, all-but-mandatory questions for the Faint you are really much better off not asking, should you happen to engage one of the Omaha band’s members in either casual or professional conversation. No one warns you about this in advance–there’s no PR heavy standing by with a…

Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs. With apologies to Sir Paul–plenty of people, in fact. Up and down the radio dial, there they are: love songs. They pop, they hop, they indie rock; they balladeer, they bitch and moan; they keen in urgent tremolo alongside pedal…

Indie rock’s most enduring institution has reaped more praise than it can handle: With a collective fear of striking a false note that borders on the paranoid, and an equivalently intense aesthetic curiosity, the trio of Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew practically defines the word “credibility.” At least…

The reaction to Steve Malkmus’ eponymous 2001 debut was astonishingly consistent. “Whew,” sighed hardcore Pavement fans: Malkmus was a little poppier, a little more straightforward than any Pavement recording, but it still sounded like Pavement. Non-fans seemed likewise relieved: The wordplay made actual sense, and you could even hum along…

“Noooooooo!!!!” Dirtbombs front man Mick Collins hasn’t even heard the whole question, but he’s heard enough: the words “Detroit,” “garage rock” and “scene” in close enough proximity to each other to trigger this scream. “God, noooooooo!!!” Except, out of the mouth of the Dirtbombs’ big-voiced, barrel-chested front man, it’s more…

It doesn’t stretch the imagination much to use some pedal steel and a few maracas to evoke the landscape of the Southwest–rocky desert, border towns–but the remarkable thing about Calexico has always been the way Joey Burns and John Convertino tread beyond the clichés of their band’s country and mariachi…

Damien Kulash is getting a little tired of all the questions about semiotics. Now, this is an issue you might expect from, say, a member of the Académie Française, or a Warhol manqué making silk screens of Osama, or Spielberg toward the end of a Q&A at Berkeley. But it’s…

Overheard at a bar in the wee hours of New Year’s Eve: “Well, the thing about the floor is, there’s nowhere left for me to fall.” Eric Bachmann, late of Archers of Loaf and now the Tom Waits-lite croon–er–croaker of Crooked Fingers, might have written that line. As the front…

Word on the street has it that the blues never influenced Doug Martsch until a couple of years ago, when he heard an Alan Lomax recording of Fred Macdowell playing “Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind on Jesus).” Whereupon, the rumor goes, the erstwhile Built to Spill front man…

The members of Phantom Planet have problems. It might not sound like it, but they do. Listen: The band’s second album, The Guest, has drawn kudos from critics, garnered national press attention and spawned one legit hit, “California.” Consequently, their label, Epic Records, is 100 percent behind them, as befits…

Conor Oberst, the man who is Bright Eyes, does not aim small. Speaking about his most recent album, Lifted or The Story is in the Soil Keep Your Ear to the Ground, he touches on what he considers its overarching theme: “It’s sort of about…celebrating music and the love I…

Dimly, across the crackling phone line, all the way from Australia, there it is: undeniably, a rooster. It’s dark all over America, but on Avalanches founder Robbie Chater’s end, countryside morning is being trumpeted. Cock-a-doodle-doo, punctuating commentary about The Avalanches’ summer-in the-city debut, Since I Left You. Odd, but appropriate…

The belatedly released recording of the nine songs laid down at the band’s first studio session, Pixies reveals that as early as ’87, the Pixies had already come up with some of their best tunes. Pixies fans (and if you aren’t one, say a novena and run to the record…