Luna’s show Saturday night at the Ridglea Theater is the week’s best alternative to seeing the Stones next month in San Antonio; Ryan Adams’ gig the same night at the Granada is the second-best. Or is it? When it’s not hitting the spot, Demolition, a new CD of tunes the…

If you’ve got a taste for long-running rock-and-roll bands, you can wait till the Rolling Stones make their way to San Antonio in November to get your rocks off this autumn. But you might do just as well heading to the Ridglea Theater on Saturday night and watching Luna, New…

The last time Josh Davis had lots of people he didn’t know talking and writing about him, he had just fomented what many of those people had decided would become a fundamental change in the way musicians make records. His debut album as DJ Shadow, 1996’s Endtroducing…, seemed to present…

So many respectable B-list indie-rockers hitting town this week it’s a wonder they didn’t all coordinate their schedules and throw a big convention–there’s bound to be room at the Polyphonic Spree’s place for all of them, and just imagine the 3 a.m. games of Truth or Dare waiting to be…

A.I., Artificial Intelligence (DreamWorks): Shiny L.A. synth-rockers with Ray Manzarek’s kid on keyboards, A.I. faces some pretty stiff competition from Deadsy, the shiny L.A. synth-rock outfit led by Cher and Gregg Allman’s son. Artificial intelligence? To say the least. –Mikael Wood Blue Crush: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Virgin): A…

A few weeks ago I called the Lenny Kravitz/Pink/Abandoned Pools show that stopped in at the Smirnoff Music Centre the summer’s most cynically assembled package tour. That was an easy call–it was August, and anyone hitting the road with Kravitz obviously isn’t hankering for a slam-bang set of rock and…

For all the talk of hot new garage-rock bands making their way out of expensive rehearsal spaces in gentrified New York City neighborhoods, this year’s most crucial artifact of scrappy guitar-bass-drums friction is the sixth album from a Portland-based band that, as its album artwork has it, practices in a…

How indie rock got its groove back: Four D.C. scenesters listen to ZZ Top’s Eliminator nonstop for a week, realize its might but recognize its limits (narrow field of focus, reluctance to test goal-oriented MTV viewers’ patience, songs exclusively about body parts or carburetors) and set about retooling the formula…

And so the summer-concert season winds to its slow denouement with Ozzy Osbourne’s traveling freak show setting up shop at the Smirnoff Music Centre on Sunday for 14 hours of occasionally devil-worshiping, more often simply loud live entertainment. The show boasts its usual share of filler–Seether, Ill Niño, Switched, Chevelle,…

“Quick, dude, my hipster cousin and his girlfriend from Brooklyn are coming over to the house in, like, 10 minutes! Hide those Alice in Chains boots and find something cool to put on for when they get here!” You’ve been here before, right? We all have. (Well, not me personally,…

If The Willies is any indication, Bill Frisell could probably make “Achy Breaky Heart” sound like a walk in the clouds. Here the rangy jazz guitarist, banjo player (and Bad Liver) Danny Barnes and bassist Keith Lowe revisit the terrain Frisell explored on 1995’s Nashville, spinning a handful of folk…

Let’s hear it for the underappreciated singer-songwriter dudes. Except not really, in John Mayer’s case. This dorm-room heartthrob’s taken a nation of underage Dave Matthews fans by storm, giving jangly guitar-pop a voice that doesn’t necessarily pay homage to R.E.M. and doesn’t necessarily demonstrate any tangible allegiance to the “roots…

Taken separately, any of the mid-’90s alt-rock dependables working hard for the money on this package tour might draw a respectable crowd and a low level of snickering. But together? It’s like Christmas, and the wise men are aging rockers with a quickly slipping grasp of the zeitgeist. What’s impressive–and…

Don’t you sometimes wonder how many of Beck’s artistic triumphs are more the result of context than ingenuity? That we wouldn’t be nearly as impressed by his raggedy folk songs if they weren’t preceded by Day-Glo disco-pop, or that we wouldn’t consider him the white man’s Prince if we didn’t…

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the latest from good-hearted Oklahoma City psychedelics the Flaming Lips, is the record you’ve been looking for this summer if Signs creeped you out and the new Def Leppard leaves you a little cold–it’s sonically imaginative, structurally adventurous work that doesn’t skimp on the Big…

Beware the former longhairs this week: With aging prog-rock giants Yes and Rush hitting the Smirnoff Music Centre separately in a three-day period (it’s like a non-coincidence out of an M. Night Shyamalan movie, isn’t it?), there’s no telling what one of them might do should you impede his or…

I’d pretty much written off Silverchair when, on its 2000 greatest-hits set, it confirmed all those accusations of post-alt-rock gravedigging by covering Minor Threat’s “Minor Threat” as a lameozoid jock-rock throwaway that proved that’s how the band heard it in the first place. (They also subtitled that disc “Volume 1,”…

If this isn’t the summer concert season’s most cynically assembled package tour, I obviously missed the R. Kelly/Gary Glitter double bill. Lenny Kravitz gets to play to a younger audience than the graying Guess Who devotees he’s getting used to; Pink takes another step in the acid-washed, pre-alternative rock direction…

A few months ago I rode through rush-hour Times Square traffic in the backseat of a rented town car, squished between the two members of Blackalicious, both of whom could probably take me in a game of whatever they’d like. “If you start getting into things like, ‘Oh, if you…

The Baha Men are no doubt making more from Barry Sonnenfeld’s liberal use of their surprisingly immortal “Who Let the Dogs Out” in Men in Black II than they are from sales of their latest, Move It Like This (which seems as much a purchase-power directive as a suggestion to…

You wouldn’t know it from her increasingly pleasant albums, but Beth Orton is one hell of a risk-taker. Her new Daybreaker swings so close to the kind of icky New Age treacle you only hear in dentists’ offices that it’s hard to believe it’s actually pretty close to what she’s…

Though she’s lived life as both a post-punk pioneer and an alt-rock heroine, Kim Deal’s got her doubts about her latest work. “Nobody’s gonna like the record,” she says of Title TK, the album she’s been trying to release for eight years. “Why would anyone like it? It’s slow. It’s…