For all the problems the mainstreaming of emo has created–the validation of high school whining as high art, say, or the Get Up Kids’ and the Promise Ring’s hiring big-name producers to conceal a lack of actual songs, or a dwindling supply of horn-rimmed glasses and thrift-store T-shirts–what’s cool about…

Thursday night’s the night for rounded-edge hip-hop that soothes as much as it moves. When Atlanta-based headliner India.Arie appeared last year with Acoustic Soul (following several years of post-Lilith Fair wandering) it seemed the neo-soul movement had gone and produced its very own Phoebe Snow, a reanimation not exactly on…

Though they’ve spent the past year playing relatively big-ass rooms like the one they’ll play here Saturday night, don’t the Strokes seem like a smaller, cooler rock band today than the one they were last fall? Minus the all-Strokes-all-the-time media coverage that met its release, Is This It, the group’s…

Every time I accidentally catch the twin brothers who front Good Charlotte hosting MTV2’s All Things Rock (which is never more than twice a week, promise) I say a little prayer that when I was 14, Green Day’s Kerplunk represented state-of-the-art pop-punk instead of the defanged mall-rock that currently fills…

Wondering what Beck’s gonna sound like with Oklahoma psych-pop nuts the Flaming Lips as his backing band? This 20-year-old Norwegian kid’s already figured it out: On Faces Down, his very nifty debut album, Sondre Lerche juices the serpentine space-folk of Mutations and Sea Change with the candy-colored instrumental flourishes the…

The new post-punk descends upon Denton. New York’s Ex Models have a new split EP out with the Seconds, a band that features one of the dudes from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs; the Models’ side is very fast and includes riffs that don’t leave much room for elaboration. Pretty Girls…

The 21-year-old Baltimore kid who’s headlining this traveling tour of artists affiliated with the Bay Area electronic-music indie Tigerbeat6 calls himself Cex, and if you think that’s funny, you’ll love Tall, Dark, and Handcuffed, his new album. Like much of the stuff Tigerbeat6 releases, it’s a sometimes tacit, sometimes active…

Françoise Cactus and Brezel Göring weren’t exaggerating when they named their band Stereo Total: A French-German duo based in Berlin and given to collaborating with various other folks who pay for their records with euros, ST makes a version of cut-and-paste pop that doesn’t cut much, a spirited, surprisingly subtle…

They might be terrible dressers, they might have chosen a dreadful band name, they might even be friends with those dorks the Get Up Kids, but don’t let anyone tell you that Lawrence, Kansas, popsters the Anniversary aren’t crafty: Designing a Nervous Breakdown, the band’s tuneful 2000 debut, packed just…

If Black Dice, Karate and k. are making northeast Texas a safe place for wizened college rockers this week, the perpetually adolescent among us need not feel abandoned: Shows by Sum 41 and Everclear and KEGL-FM’s Freakers Ball should provide safe havens for confused teens on the prowl for identity-rich…

Well, I guess this is growing up. The Brooklyn-based fashionistas in Black Dice used to be Providence art-school noiseniks–I remember a brief 2000 disc on Troubleman Unlimited that sounded like a junkyard on fire–but their new Beaches & Canyons (issued via the super-hip NYC indie DFA Records) is an amorphous…

Surprising to see No Doubt still hard at work behind Rock Steady, the surprisingly excellent album the surprisingly long-running Orange County outfit released nearly a year ago. Not because the record can’t support it–it could probably withstand two more singles, in fact–but because the disc suggested the band was more…

Last week Dallas was hit hard by commercial pop-punk bands committed to giving the form as complication-free a reading as possible; this week we’re getting a handful of outfits using major-label cash to make rock that defies the expectations that have come to dog aggressive music. Not that you’ll see…

“What is hip?” Gov’t Mule front man Warren Haynes asks on The Deep End Volume 2, his band’s new album. For starters, it’s not something anyone who’ll stand onstage at the Gypsy Tea Room on Tuesday night knows much about, which is totally why you should go. These guys are…

What’s worse than second-generation corporate pop-punk? Third-generation corporate pop-punk! Tell that to tattooed Chicago ne’er-do-wells Mest, who invade the Galaxy Club on Thursday, and they’ll likely spit on your glasses. “The words you say I’ll never listen to,” they promise on “Fuct Up Kid,” a spirited number on the band’s…

Sad dudes, sad tunes. Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys show up first, at Gypsy Tea Room on Thursday night, and it’s a good thing: The precise honky-tonk laments on their third album, Your Favorite Fool, are so genre-specific they don’t demand much unpacking to reveal their lovelorn frowns–all it…

This six-week traveling package tour couldn’t have its heart in a more righteous place. Ten percent of the money made from ticket sales goes to benefit the National Hopeline Network, a Virginia-based suicide-prevention program that aims to give people in trouble easy access to instant telephone counseling, “regardless of where…

Though I’ve yet to witness the uninhibited live show that reportedly is the band’s raison d’être, New York-based “Ukrainian Gypsy punk cabaret” outfit Gogol Bordello asks an important question on its electrifying new album, Multi Kontra Culti vs. Irony: Why is so much American music of dissent joyless and tiresome…

The well-known radio DJ Nic Harcourt’s daily Morning Becomes Eclectic show on Santa Monica, California’s KCRW is a good place to observe the effects of the Internet on popular alternative music. Harcourt gives lots of airtime to the types of bands that thrive on the word of mouth chat rooms…

Perhaps Tenacious D have done more harm than good. (If you’re not into micro-sized arena rock and “cock push-ups,” you’ve probably already reached this conclusion.) Sure, they’ve revivified the idea of intentional rock comedy at a time when goateed rap-metal front men are holding down the accidental department, and, yes,…

Remember earnest Pennsylvania Dutch Country rockers Live? Jason Wade does, and he’s built a career around the memory to prove it. On Stanley Climbfall, Wade’s band Lifehouse’s second album, he resurrects the idea, once championed by Live in songs with titles like “The Beauty of Gray,” that muscular alt-rock can…

Sure, Elvis Costello sounds crankier than he has in a while on When I Was Cruel, the fine new album he released in April. And, yeah, it features more of his own guitar playing than guest spots by respected string sections or fancy opera singers. Oh, and Burt Bacharach’s not…