One of the best pound-for-pound live rock n roll bands today has committed a cardinal sin: Kinski have gone and played too much rock. The Seattle quartet managed to please pretty much everybody with their 2003 Sub Pop bow, Airs Above Your Station, which fused their proclivity for minimalist psychedelia…

Just when it seemed Chicago’s Pelican had reached a creative impasse, they took the strong, if weird, step forward that an album titled The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw might imply. These four atmospheric riff-meisters have found a home on progressive hardcore stronghold Hydrahead Records, creeping ever…

Now here’s an interesting cross-section of American indie-hood. Yes, the Oxford Collapse are from Brooklyn, and yes, they are dancy enough to name-drop electro-clashy Williamsburg alongside the nuevo No Wave of the Rapture and Les Savy Fav. Luckily, that background is immaterial to the crux of this taut trio and…

If you stray into the world of sincere, gut-busting songcraft via folks like Jay Farrar and Slobberbone’s Brent Best, you ought to step in the direction of Adam Carroll. He comes from the old storytelling lineage of Townes Van Zandt and John Prine, but his outlook is fresh, and the…

At their first Denton show since 1997, reunited space-rockers Mazinga Phaser return to the city with fitting support. Kyle Cheatam’s acid-goth carnival The Night Game takes cues from his better-known local band The Pointy Shoe Factory, and the evening’s first act, American Vodka, features an all-star congregation of Austin cosmic…

What’s a rave without glowsticks and designer drugs, smart drinks and Garbage Pail Kids T-shirts? Well, if you ask Kid606, it’s more about beer-slinging, cheap speed and, most of all, squelchy, mutated musical creations reminiscent of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel. Throw in a few of the Kid’s trademark tongue-in-cheek…

Joining two members of Saddle Creek Records’ Greater Omaha roster on Thursday is an up-and-comer who may one day trump them all. Zykos’ ass-kicking arrangements sway between dissonance and melodic embellishment, and Austin’s Michael Booher fronts the group with a powerful, nasal voice of the Michael Stipe/Conor Oberst type and…

Back from the grave is Mazinga Phaser, the band at the center of the late-’90s Denton space-rock vortex. On Friday, founder and local space-rock chieftain Mwanza Dover unveiled his “Mazinga Phaser II” project to commemorate the band’s 10-year anniversary. Spacey video graphics and droning feedback recalled old Melodica festivals, and…

It’s hardly possible to beat the Radar Bros. at their game, a slow-strummed perfection that recalls Pink Floyd’s quiet psychedelic balladry, while delving into the immaculate California-chill harmonies of the Byrds. It’s no surprise they reside on the consistently stellar Merge label, but what is surprising is that they remain…

Once upon a time, Denton made a name for itself with festivals like this. Unbelievably, it’s now been nearly a decade since the first Melodica festival created the phrase “Denton space rock,” but the spirit lives on, and so does the sound of swirling, cascading guitars and slow-churning, subversive melodies…

There is a long and a short way to describe Mono: A) the Japanese Mogwai; B) Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered and the Sun Shined. If you chose B, then you know about last year’s excellent under-the-radar third album. If you chose A, then you are primed…

After a handful of records that were probably more disturbing than effective, Bay Area art-rockers Xiu Xiu broke out last year with Fabulous Muscles, the most accessible work yet for a group that decidedly needs that access. Out-of-the-blue electro-beats, creaky drones and spasmodic dissonance wrap around the freaky, almost-cabaret delivery…

“There comes a time when nothing seems clear. Passed out on the front porch with a head full of beer.” It doesn’t get any truer than Slobberbone’s “Front Porch”–sung with Brent Best’s hardscrabble twang and grit, it was the porch that birthed a thousand house parties. As the Denton music…

When was it–the day before yesterday?–when Mogwai was the hottest new thing? They were young Scots with slow-slow-LOUD panache, forging a new instrumental-rock gateway to the 21st century. So maybe we’re a bit complacent after the inevitable midcareer slump (’03’s Happy Songs for Happy People). But slumps are relative, and…

You can play name-that-influence with this album till you’re blue in the face, but the first thing that sticks with me is the first song’s opening line: “It looked like a crime scene covered up with ice cream.” In the same way Interpol was forgiven for being Joy Division hacks…

Did you say this was Lou Barlow’s first ever solo album? What gives? Barlow’s been the dominant force in everything he’s done since exiting Dinosaur Jr. at the end of the ’80s, including bushels of four-track home recordings as Sentridoh and variants thereof. He’s been touted as the king of…

Their home is the beer-soaked dives of Austin, but Okkervil River is just as comfortable in the rustic woods of New Hampshire or on a train to post-Reconstruction Kansas City. They’ve been known to belt out Appalachian murder ballads, but more often the songs are Will Sheff’s coming-of-age confessionals rife…

It is, without exception, bad form when a group sings about MTV on a single that will actually find its way onto the network’s rotation. This is something you’d expect from Jay-Z or late-period Duran Duran, not from Austin’s Trail of Dead, kings of the volume-crackling mayhem and violent instrument…

Sometime during the dizzying barrage of roars, moans and pterodactyl groans spraying from the Wreck Room stage, I remembered what Ghostcar guitarist Daniel Huffman told me before the show about trumpet player Karl Poetschke. “Karl is kind of elusive. Karl lives on a boat, or sometimes out in the desert.”…

Isis is for the metalheads. Isis is for the metal-haters. You know those parts in a Tool song when everything breaks down and fat layers of saturation bounce off each other before another dramatic riff comes down the pike that’s 10 times bigger and better than the last? That part…

Spoon trivia 101: The band appropriated its name from a song by German underground experimental (Kraut)rock icons Can. Spoon trivia 201: Front man Britt Daniel has long acknowledged the Austin band’s debt to enigmatic art-punks Wire, whose jagged sensibility dominates 1998’s criminally overlooked A Series of Sneaks. Of course, those…

What next for the Delgados? The Carpenters-vs.-Flaming Lips grandeur of last year’s Hate already lies on the top shelf next to the very best their Glasgow, Scotland, scene brethren Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai, Arab Strap and Snow Patrol have to offer. Alun Woodward and the all-powerful Emma Pollock just shrugged…