Since Aimee Mann fought the record-biz law and won, she’ll probably yankee hotel foxtrot through good reviews for the rest of her career. But along with all the what-nice-melodies-you-have that accompanied last year’s Lost in Space, critics dished out complaints that Mann sounded cold and unemotional, unmoored from some supposed…
Duncan Sheik could’ve been a contender. OK, maybe not a contender, but a guy with more than one great song inside him. “Barely Breathing” still brings back warm freshman-year memories, driving around with a girlfriend who wouldn’t last, wishing the radio played more stuff that disguised real songcraft beneath blandly…
Red-headed Lena Katina and brown-haired Julia Volkova are t.A.T.u., two Russian teen-agers who may or may not be lesbians involved in a steamy underage relationship; 200 km/h in the Wrong Lane, their English-language debut, is scorched-earth teen-exploitation pop nearly as good as “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “Leader of the Pack.”…
Pink and Shakira made serious inroads last year for major-label pop tarts trying hard to shake up the system. Pink, of course, decided Y Kant Tori Read wasn’t such a bad listen and so toughened up her outré R&B with help from a 4 Non Blonde, of all people. As…
Listmaking, especially the year-end variety, lends itself to the careful selection of absolute favorites–picking which albums and singles best articulated a certain idea, emotion, joke or sensation. But 2002, like the past couple of years before it, didn’t yield such easy victors; filesharing, cheap technology and the increased intermingling of…
1. Christina Aguilera, Stripped (RCA): Last year was Christina Aguilera’s for the taking: Stripped, the long-awaited follow-up to her smash 1999 debut, arrived just as teen-pop took its first steps into a delicate post-pubescence, with artists making bolder creative statements and listeners actually taking them seriously. But instead of delivering…
The New York-based dance label Ultra excels at neat summations of current electronic-music fads: Its recent electroclash compilation pitted young nü-wavers like Chicks on Speed and Fischerspooner against their stalwart ’80s antecedents, and its new trance set, though by definition creatively atrophied, condenses all the big-room exhilaration that scene has…
Saint Etienne traffic in opposites: A product of dismal Thatcher-era England, the trio buried its late-’80s angst in candied dance-pop that conflated disco’s feel-good throb with girl-group élan and ’60s-pop melodies, only to go live-band for 1998’s sparkling Good Humor, hooking up with Cardigans producer Tore Johansson at the exact…
No. 17 on my List of Things I’d Like to Someday Know: why every other band of young British guys partial to swirly guitars and with a thing for groove eventually ends up aping Exile on Main Street and wearing too much denim. Primal Scream, the Jesus and Mary Chain,…
Whitney Houston’s return after an eight-year absence, 1998’s My Love Is Your Love, should not have worked as well as it did: Houston had firmly entered her career’s second decade, so hiring R&B’s hippest producers to modernize her sound seemed like a last grasp at the credibility younger, edgier singers…
Electric Circus, the new album by the Chicago-bred rapper Common, is a late contender for hip-hop album of the year: It’s a wildly textured, lovingly drawn tapestry of urban psychedelia that, like Meshell Ndegeocello’s recently overlooked Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, imagines the form as a febrile mixture of funk, soul,…
If you think incensed player haters restrict their animosity to large-living hip-hop stars, mentally unstable R&B songbirds and Fred Durst, you obviously haven’t gotten a swig of the Hater-ade currently being spilled online over these two unlikely outfits: Icelandic tone poets Sigur Rós and French-Canadian noiseniks Godspeed You! Black Emperor…
Mississippi’s 3 Doors Down make top-notch second-notch rock: “Kryptonite,” the big one from their debut, 2000’s The Better Life, married cleanly corrosive guitars, efficient rock-dude vocals, a Nickelback chorus that actually swung and a snare drum riff that made it easy to pick out on the radio. Away From the…
Alt-rock pace car Frank Black simultaneously released his seventh and eighth solo albums this summer, proving to Pixies lovers, two-track-recording aficionados and those partial to bizarre flights of surreal lyrical fancy that you should never underestimate a man who’s changed his name at least two times in his life. The…
The new TLC record feels less icky to me than the last Who tour, but I’m not sure why. Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey explained their quick return to the road in July with a well-paid session guy in John Entwistle’s place as a tribute to the enduring spirit of…
Need a shot of pure Midwestern rage this week, but can’t find anyone willing to go see 8 Mile for the eighth time? Take your tortured ass down to Deep Ellum Live on Tuesday night, where Taproot, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Mudvayne, from Peoria, Illinois, will prove just how…
Everybody knows that Shania Twain and Mutt Lange got married forever ago (did you see the picture? Mutt looks like Patrick Swayze with Melissa Manchester’s perm, so it’s no wonder Behind the Music keeps using that one photo), but did you know that they freaking live in Switzerland!? I fully…
Lots of revised-history indie rock in town this week. Matt Pond PA, a sextet from Pennsylvania built around a dude named Matt Pond, wonders what the fussy English folk songs of Nick Drake and John Martyn would sound like if written and played by a sextet from Pennsylvania; the answer,…
I don’t really put much stock in the concept of the guilty pleasure, but if you’re gonna feel guilty about liking something, shouldn’t it be really pleasurable? That’s the question Diana Krall’s new Verve disc, Live in Paris, keeps asking me: The Canadian singer-pianist’s playing is certainly fine, and her…
Chris Robinson’s learned a lot since his days fronting America’s best jam-band-that-actually-wrote-great-songs, the Black Crowes: “Your California traffic,” he observes in “Sunday Sound,” a tune on New Earth Mud, his new solo joint, “I said, well, it just ain’t no fun.” And from “Katie Dear”: “Tuesday morning, hear the traffic…
It’s been a good year for gently genre-jamming albums by rangy roots-music ladies–recent discs from Allison Moorer, Patty Griffin, Norah Jones and Caitlin Cary have shown how possible it is to dress up country intimacy in pop pleasure without sounding like Shania or Faith or LeAnn. Even Sheryl Crow’s C’mon,…
There’s nothing wrong with self-consciously lightweight pop records that seem to exist solely to spark a smile or a warm flutter in the abdomen–ever heard the Association’s “Never My Love” on a rainy Sunday afternoon and wished it would go on forever? On Guestroom the self-consciously lightweight New York City…
