The congenitally collegiate Brooklyn-based indie-pop outfit Aden named its last two albums, Black Cow and Hey 19, after Steely Dan songs, and while the idiosyncrasies the band buries within the fussy clean-channel noodling on its new Topsiders probably wouldn’t attract the attention of Messrs. Fagen and Becker–can you imagine anything…

The emo-pop underground gets no more mainstream-leaning than this: earnest Chicago quartet Hey Mercedes (who used to be called Braid when a different guy played second guitar), goofy Boston geeks Piebald and determined Ohio popsters Koufax, all hitting town the same week as their more successful contemporary Dashboard Confessional in…

He knows what you’re thinking, this Chris Carrabba fellow. He knows you’ve seen his video on MTV, the one where he gets in the fight with the actress playing his girlfriend and she leaves the apartment and he stares forlornly into the camera. He knows you’ve heard his band, Dashboard…

Sonic Youth is old. Probably older than you. But they’re also an endlessly inventive bunch of grown-ups, a band that for 20 years has been examining and re-examining guitar-rock, finding and occasionally discarding new ways into the form. Murray Street, their new album, rocks. Probably more than you’d expect, and…

What a bunch of brats. The new-school art-punks on this traveling package deal’ll spit in your eyes as soon as they’ll cater to your taste for provocation–too much school, too much underground notoriety and too many inside jokes have made these kids prickly pears at early ages, but there’s plenty…

It’s shaping up to be a spectacular year for perfectly formed lifestyle rock. The Strokes’ record is still happening, the Hives are making the Strokes look lame, Phantom Planet are hanging out with (or being) movie stars, the White Stripes are doing the same. And now cute Chicago dorks OK…

Here’s a casually bizarre bill that should appeal to those pop fans who don’t consider the vehement packaging of catchy melodies and untucked shirts a reason to buy more stuff. Irish pop-punks Ash and Spoon front man Britt Daniel have both encountered a good deal of record-biz misanthropy–Ash must know…

Lots of complicated women’s hair in Dallas this week–Britney Spears, Sheryl Crow, Kittie–but this is the real mother lode: Alaskan airhead Jewel, who sports a long blond mane on the cover of This Way, and Norwegian Olsen Twins look-alikes M2M, whose highlights probably cost more than their airfare. Jewel’s smart…

This Jeep-sponsored traveling all-day festival is billing itself as a “musical celebration of the outside active lifestyle,” but that’s nonsense–the only reason you should feel at all compelled to go is to check out what reasonably talented people can do with expensive recording equipment inside darkened rooms that cost a…

Poor, poor Britney Spears. With a third album only as deep as its Neptunes-produced hits, a messy breakup with Justin Timberlake and a food-poisoning case at her new NYC restaurant on her hands, this partially deposed pop princess must be longing for the good old days of 2000, when she…

He may be a bald, vegan, gospel-loving peacenik, but ask him the wrong question and Moby turns into one combative little dude. Witness: Me: So, new record, new songs, new live show. What can we expect this time out? Moby: Well, when I make the records it’s just me in…

Considering his band’s gradual estrangement from the nü-metal scene it helped take mainstream, you’d think Incubus DJ Chris Kilmore would be less sanguine about the group’s free-floating status these days. After all, the perfunctory DJ scratch is one of the central elements that first distinguished nü-metal from regular old metal,…

The Strokes will fade from glory, as will the popular resurgence in taste for garage rock–this much seems inevitable. (Doesn’t it? Or can we look forward to a future in which Barbra Streisand gets called out of retirement to sing Mitch Ryder tunes? And Liza Minnelli has the Hives play…

On her third album New England folk-pop chanteuse Patty Griffin gets her full, slightly husky alto to work overtime for her: 1000 Kisses is that rare singer-songwriter record that winds its way through a handful of stylistic settings but holds together as the work of a single voice. There’s plenty…

When a nü-metal band decides it wants to be scary, who is it the band decides to scare? Its fans? Its fans’ parents? Other nü-metal bands? Themselves? Embattled electro-goth outfit Deadsy doesn’t offer any clues: Commencement, their new, long-delayed DreamWorks debut, turns early-’80s synth-pop into a gory prep-school horror show…

If you’re pumped to see every band hitting town with the Warped Tour on Friday, you’re either insane or you’re 12. But if you’re an aging skate rat with more than a passing interest in what the heirs to your throne are up to (or you’re 12 but you really…

Surprisingly, the Brooklyn duo I Am the World Trade Center isn’t the only outfit in the indie-rock underground where the boyfriend plays dinky synth-pop on a computer and the girlfriend sings anodyne melodies in a voice that’s supposed to humanize machine music. The California band Her Space Holiday functions in…

You know indie rock’s begun its slide into respectability (or calcification) when its front people start tossing out solo albums like guitar picks. Recent discs by Modest Mouse singer Isaac Brock and former Archer of Loaf Eric Bachmann have straddled the divide between essential slacker-guy pathos and superfluous minor-key mewing,…

Maybe 11 or 12 years ago I saw Social Distortion with my dad at an outdoor summer-themed concert series in Little Rock, where I grew up. Seeing Social Distortion with your dad is weird, but I guess I was too young to go alone or he was too old to…

Not to get all George W. on your ass, but how come one of the most exciting English-speaking rock bands currently capturing American hearts is from Sweden? I thought the Strokes were supposed to be a reminder of our knack for empty calories–the Hives just plow over the Fab Five…

With the music he composed for last year’s John Travolta techno-clunker Swordfish, trance titan Paul Oakenfold confused the idea of composing a soundtrack with actually replicating the crashes and explosions crucial to any big-budget action flick. The resultant album was music-as-extreme sport, the bloodless electronic rush of trance married to…

Romantic to some, maybe: “It’s painful to observe him looking at your curls/It’s sorry to be me, sad to be a churl.” That’s about as amorous as Luna front man Dean Wareham gets on Romantica, his band’s sixth album of shimmering, downbeat guitar-pop. If you’re familiar with the detached personality…