Were you drawn to Cornershop’s left-field 1997 hit “Brimful of Asha” because it sounded like nothing in your record collection or because it sounded like everything in your record collection condensed down to five and a half minutes? That’s the question these polyglot London-based zanies have made a career out…

How do you tell a diva from a D-cup? Less succinctly, what separates our buxom, banal American pop stars from the rest of the world’s icy femme fatales? Here we get Britney Spears thinking Pat Benatar sang “I Love Rock and Roll” and barfing up a bloodless cover to prove…

A lot of rock writers got excited about the Chicago band Local H’s 1998 album Pack Up the Cats, a concept piece about a small-town rocker’s bid for big-time success, because it convincingly resuscitated the obviously flagging mode of music originally popularized by workhorse Midwestern outfits like Styx and REO…

Ah, the Beta Band. Perhaps no other band making records right now so closely resembles the Bad News Bears as this perennially goofy Scottish quartet: On tour last summer with Radiohead playing arenas and outdoor amphitheaters the group would amble onstage before it even got dark, dressed as shamans or…

As is true with many of the new breed of male singer-songwriters currently populating the same cultural blip, there’s plenty on paper to immediately dislike about Atlanta-based musician John Mayer: his goody-goody sincerity, his polished presentation, his loosely handsome good looks. Much like his labelmate Pete Yorn, he reminds you…

No one’s really surprised anymore when a pensive singer-songwriter in a button-up shirt (or maybe a lovable old ringer tee) shows up on MTV or in the weekend pages of USA Today, wearing a terribly earnest look on his face and strumming his battered acoustic as though his 401(k) depended…

Music fans disappointed by a lusterless display of the unbridled genre-mashing they’d assumed implicit in the 21st century–those listeners possessed of an appetite not sated by Pink’s new one, that is–might do well to drop into the Ridglea Theater on Friday night for a glimpse at two outfits actually making…

Though complete artistic invention ranks pretty high on my list of potential reasons to like a band–this is where Wings would fit in, for example–a lot of times an effective interpretation of an existing form is good enough to do the trick. Friday night we’ll get two such interpreters at…

If nothing else, the English band Clinic deserves a seat on that upcoming commercial flight into space (you know, the one Lance Bass got denied) for sounding pretty much nothing like Radiohead. No offense to Coldplay and Elbow and South (and Starsailor and Lowgold), but the wide-screen hand-wringing the U.K.’s…

After the fine-lined deluge of technically astute, occasionally bloodless post-rock that commanded the Chicago-based underground-rock scene in the late 1990s, I was beginning to wonder when that city would recultivate its devotion to the shamblingly polluted music that initially brought it attention, back when a young Drag City Records was…

Anyone who’s managed to turn on a radio or MTV or leaf through a magazine or a newspaper over the past couple of months won’t have trouble telling you that The Strokes have taken their scuzzy New York City shuffle way beyond the five boroughs, making a coast-to-coast sensation out…

Green Day and blink-182–who next month begin a joint U.S. tour that will take them into the middle of June–make a good pair onstage in front of screaming fans: Both bands boast three relatively amiable dudes with knacks for three-chord pop-punk more gooey than it seems and soft spots for…

Had the singular pleasure last week of hearing Is a Woman, the new album by the avant-country outfit Lambchop, in its perfect setting, standing in a 45-minute line at the post office, waiting to send a certified letter to my mom. If you’re not familiar with Lambchop, or only know…

Usually you figure the rock star doesn’t want to be asked about his guitar solos–that it’s old hat, something he’s had to pontificate on countless times in his career as a professional musician, each time getting closer and closer to slipping into that glazed autopilot mode familiar to anyone who’s…

Let’s say you’re a young person, maybe between the ages of 19 and 26, and you’ve finished school and you’ve moved to a new city and you’re happily in the process of finding your way around the world, maybe working a job, maybe not, maybe riding a bike, maybe driving…

So, OK, yes, I spent more nights last year standing with my arms crossed in rock clubs than standing with my arms crossed in dance clubs (and still more nights than that sitting cross-legged at home watching Law & Order). But even if the paradigmatic shift that was supposed to…

Don’t know about you, but I’m personally counting the days till an emo star ends up on Oprah. At a small club gig in New York City a couple of weeks ago, Rainer Maria guitarist Kyle Fischer opened his set by thanking a dozen or so people (by name and…

Alicia Keys is so 2001’s Lauryn Hill: a young, beautiful, smart African-American woman with more talent than the white critical community knows how to handle, pushed to the lip of the mainstream media stage by editors and producers grateful for the chance to chip away at their guilt over never…

Where do punk rockers go to die? Or at least to mellow? If the paths of more than a handful of young guys who used to thrash about with guitars and provocative haircuts are any indication, the answer is their inner hard drives. Marc Bianchi, the human behind the computer-love…

If Wednesday’s The Gloria Record/Her Space Holiday/Ides of Space show at Gypsy Tea Room is proof that indie rock as a sociocultural entity has moved beyond the raw materials of guitars and drums and such to embrace a postmodern sensibility in which artists are inclined to consider their own creative…

Reading Jay McInerney’s Model Behavior last week–basically a gloss on the author’s celebrated 1987 novel Bright Lights, Big City, with some juicy stuff about sexual jealousy and women’s underwear thrown in–I was forced to consider head-on a current pet interest: the recent re-examination of the 1980s as a font of…

For the past few years, we’ve polled the Dallas Observer’s stable of music writers to determine how full of shit the bottom of the barrel was over the past 12 months in an effort to arrive at the 10 most pointless uses of studio time and jewel cases. Below, you’ll…