After another two years of radio domination and pop-culture omnipresence by Neptunes Inc., Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo (and their curiously fair-weather rapper friend Shay) have returned to the skate park of your mind with Fly or Die, the second offering from their generally rock-oriented side project N.E.R.D. Like In…

The Secret Machines aren’t the only Texas-to-New York success story awaiting clubgoers this week: Nerdy, Brooklyn-based Ivy League melodists Bishop Allen, whose lead singer, Justin Rice, is a Dallas native, hit the Barley House on Monday night in support of their thoroughly peppy self-released debut, Charm School. I’m on the…

This Canadian collective–led by Toronto scene gadabout Kevin Drew but occasionally including up to 10 other moonlighting musicians whose résumés (if not names) you’d likely recognize–drew acclaim last year for the expansive, spaced-out indie rock on its American debut, You Forgot It in People. It’s easy to float someone’s boat…

When I interviewed Modest Mouse front man Isaac Brock before the release of 2000’s The Moon & Antarctica– the band’s major-label debut after a handful of indie releases that cultivated a very devoted following–I’m pretty sure I got stoned via secondhand smoke. We were hiding out from rabid fans in…

With all the attention lavished on female R&B stars like Beyoncé, Janet Jackson and Christina Aguilera, a whole crop of talented male crooners has been getting shortchanged lately by radio, MTV and the ineffable commodity known as General Media Presence. Conveniently, this generous package tour’s stop Friday night at NextStage…

Perhaps concluding that fusing two fading musical styles is a surefire way to stave off cultural obsolescence, Cooper Temple Clause layer vehement grunge-rock melancholia atop the kind of big-beat electronica ESPN uses to add emphasis to fourth-quarter touchdowns. Most of the time on Kick Up the Fire, CTC’s second album,…

When the twisted fighters-not-lovers of Fleetwood Mac reunited last year to yield the modest creative returns of Say You Will, the band’s first real studio album since 1987’s Tango in the Night, it was easy to imagine the perks of a re-entry into the public eye offsetting the group’s storied…

First things first: Despite what you might have surmised via pre-release media hype and the odd shred of actual fact, America’s Sweetheart is not this year’s Liz Phair. For starters, the sad on Courtney Love’s first official solo album isn’t as sad as Phair’s, and the funny isn’t as funny,…

The often-costumed Welshmen of Super Furry Animals–current pop’s premier gang of guitar-strumming, string-arranging, harmony-singing, occasionally techno-pumping Wings fans–have managed a rare feat on their last two albums, 2001’s Rings Around the World and last year’s Phantom Power: dreamy, self-consciously widescreen guitar pop that offers escape into pure sound without sacrificing…

Southern California’s Incubus emerged from the rap-rock pack in 2001 when its hit single “Drive” revealed front man Brandon Boyd to be the kind of guy who might come back to his high school nine years after he graduated to give a motivational speech and award one lucky essay-writing girl…

If I somehow found myself in the clutches of a malevolent one-eyed despot who refused to let me rejoin my family in his poisonous custom-made dungeon lair unless I decided upon John Mellencamp or the Impossible Shapes as my favorite-ever Indiana-based musical artist, I’d have no problem whatsoever choosing Mellencamp…

The New New York Rock Scene needs the Fiery Furnaces for two reasons: 1) Singer/guitarist Eleanor Friedberger is a woman, and 2) she and her brother Matthew are as uncool as they are cool, which is very. The first fact is important because, despite the plentiful and deserved attention received…

At the moment, has-been pop stars like Rod Stewart and Michael McDonald have the interpretation of unlikely source material on lockdown; Stewart’s two Great American Songbook discs and McDonald’s Motown are attracting attention (and actual dollar bills) from folks who last bought a CD back when people thought Rod Stewart…

The warm-and-fuzzy Glaswegian band Camera Obscura probably inspires lots of memories of lazy summers spent strolling through sunflower fields in the burnt-out survivors of the 1960s. Like their mates Belle & Sebastian (whose front man Stuart Murdoch helped produce the band’s 2001 debut, Biggest Blue Hi-Fi), they strum guitars gingerly…

The alt-country party line on former Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt front man Jay Farrar is that once he dissolved his partnership with celebrated mumbler Jeff Tweedy, Tweedy went on to blaze all kinds of creative trails out of rootsy strum-and-twang, while Farrar tended shop close to home, slowly honing…

Two weeks ago in these pages I tipped a hat to the “shortsighted,” “solipsistic,” “retro-fixated” princes of American (and Canadian) indie rock. Though I didn’t include them in the list that followed (because their 2003 album was a snooze)–who was I talking about if not Guided by Voices, the most…

The pithy titles below spell it out better than I ever could: Chutes Too Narrow, Echoes, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?. In 2003 indie rock–that ignoble refuge of the shortsighted, the solipsistic, the retro-fixated, the immature, the self-righteous, the terminally disappointed and the simply boring–faced perhaps its greatest…

I’m not one to bow my head at the altar of false guitar-god idols. Actually, I’m not one to bow my head at the altar of true guitar-god idols. Hot-shit solos and technical know-how don’t do much for me unless they’re attached to a song or an emotion or a…

Between you and me, I’m beginning to tire ever so slightly of The Polyphonic Spree. Some days I get into my silver VW Bug, pump up the jams on my 40-gigabyte iPod and realize that the magic just isn’t what it used to be–the novelty of fitting 86 people on…

Drinking coffee with Jason Pierce of Spiritualized one morning earlier this year (actually, I drank coffee; he drank Rolling Rock), I asked him why Amazing Grace, his band’s latest album, sounds so much rawer and more off-the-cuff than the couple that preceded it. He took a swig (actually, two) and…

Sixty-two-year-old Ronald Isley is nearing the end of an unexpectedly busy year: a handsome reissue of the Isley Brothers’ 1973 LP 3+3; Body Kiss, a slyly persuasive new Isleys disc featuring Ronald and guitarist Ernie (and songwriting from R. Kelly); and a brand-new collaborative CD from Isley and composer/arranger/producer Burt…

Well-regarded Texans Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis have given themselves an early Christmas present: Happy Holidays, a seven-song EP of seasonal songs the singing-and-songwriting husband and wife recorded together and are selling at shows and through their respective Web sites. Since the Lifetime network keeps reminding me to be forgiving…