James Mercer, a quiet, soft-spoken guy from Albuquerque, New Mexico, is helping save the music he loves best. He’d probably never tell you that, even if you decided you wouldn’t hate him if he did (which you really couldn’t do once you talked to him anyway). But take a listen…
Stake a place near the front of the stage at the Gypsy Tea Room tonight to see a guy trying hard to define himself playing music that works against that. A self-styled Paul Westerberg type, young media darling Pete Yorn’s debut album, musicforthemorningafter (cute, huh?), presents a ruggedly handsome guy…
Andrew Kenny has a problem, and he isn’t ashamed to admit it: He likes long songs. Songs so long they seem to have no end. Songs so long they bleed onto other bands’ records. “Once we got something that we liked,” says the singer, guitarist and principal songwriter in the…
By this point, there isn’t anyone out there still eager to play the serious-music card, is there? No one champing at the bit to discredit hip-hop or heavy metal or twee-pop as lesser forms of a medium that counts boring ol’ Beethoven or Jeff Lynne or whoever as despot? If…
Though he routinely denies it–including about seven times in the half-hour I spend with him–Pharrell Williams is dying to be a rock star. You can tell with one look, if he’s got one of his trademark mesh trucker’s caps on, an ugly yellow or red thing with a crude depiction…
You don’t have to be a paranoid android to know who’s gonna show up at a Radiohead show. It’s like a modern-rock rogues gallery: You’ve got your music-nerd types (the guys in the seventh row squinting hard at guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s new bank of keyboards), your Top 40 refugees (the…
In the last few golden weeks of Napster’s doomed existence, I was file-sharing like, um, it was going out of business. I couldn’t get enough, mostly of dance remixes of Top 40 tunes I had no interest in paying import prices for: the Neptunes’ urbane reading of Sade’s “By Your…
Julian Casablancas, the 21-year-old man who fronts the hotly tipped New York City band the Strokes, has a knack for distilling his essence down to a line or two in really great songs full of the Velvet Underground’s primeval four-four thud, Television’s wiry guitar chatter and his own gloriously defiant…
For a bunch of trash talkers, the five thuggish, ruggish Scotchmen in Mogwai sure do make a heavenly racket. Rock Action, their new album, is the sound of post-rock quietly (and sometimes loudly) exploding, an enormous emerald-green cloud billowing out into the night sky and slowly obscuring everything you can…
You ever score a sweet pair of shoes at a garage sale long after you thought everyone had already scored all the stuff worth scoring? Then you know what it’s like to discover Powderfinger and Ours. Both acts are emerging from completely different backgrounds–Powderfinger is Australia’s biggest rock band, finally…
The Alkaline Trio is Blink-182 with the Promise Ring’s guilty conscience, the kind of guys who’ll break your heart before breaking the bottle, the kid next door who leaves flaming shit on your porch but makes mulch in the morning. So perhaps it’s no surprise that From Here to Infirmary,…
Los Angeles man about town Jon Brion’s the kind of guy you figure would probably be all right if the world melted while he was asleep and he woke up to find himself the only one left, doomed to an eternity behind the bars of his well-stocked home recording studio…
Jonny Greenwood would prefer not to be here, this I know. Talking on an intercontinental phone call to yet another journalist about how great Radiohead, in which he plays guitar, is and how important Amnesiac, its new record, is in the face of the cultural poverty that’s replaced the 21st-century…
I think G. Love is high. “What we do is just, like, American music. In this day and age, everything is one, and we just play music, you know what I mean?” Hmm. Correction: I know G. Love is high. “This is what we do, man. We just play this…
Tonight’s the night for you playa-haters who think post-punk equals post-important. The Dismemberment Plan, from Washington, D.C., makes rock and roll rooted in guitars and their traditional baggage, but it deviates from the norm via an ever-expanding vocabulary of tricks learned by paying close attention to the lunatic fringe working…
I’m about to start seriously player-hating on this fool in front of me. It’s two weeks ago, and we’re standing in a tiny stairwell to the left of the stage at Boston’s Roxy nightclub watching Sonic Youth play a show to a couple of thousand appreciative fans, which is more…
Right about now, the joke’s getting old. That’s the unfortunate reality for Norman Cook, who spent the ’80s as a Housemartin and the ’90s as a household name, famous for bringing big beat to America’s alternative nation and for that horrendous line-dancing scene in that one Freddy Prinze Jr. movie…
In the Disco Biscuits’ kitchen, beneath the grimy glitterball that’s really a bong, roly-poly Phisheads and dead-headed trance fans take turns cutting the astral rug while scratching each others’ backs, humming a hymn of solidarity that’s like a solar sunspot with a touch of gray. The Pennsylvania-based granola godhead of…
It never works: Trying to pick a winner before the race is over, calling the election before every pencil mark and mouse click is accounted for, tabulated. (Insert your own Dan Rather/Peter Jennings/Tom Brokaw joke here, because we don’t feel like it.) There are always upsets, last-minute votes, surprises. For…
A funny thing happened to mainstream hip-hop on indie hip-hop’s way to the mainstream: It became the new indie rock. Frustrated with the underground’s dogged insistence on rhymes and substance and all things anti-bling-bling, the pasty soundboys in T-shirts and wallet chains who have for years fetishized Steve Albini’s razor’s-edge…
Work with me here for a second. You’re up in the club, listening to the types of things that make clubs get crunk, sort of dancing, spilling your drink, paying too much attention to your shoes, when you suddenly realize you’re bored beyond belief. You’re uncomfortably numbed by one of…
I don’t imagine that Richard Buckner was asked to contribute to Return of the Grievous Angel, the Gram Parsons tribute album old flame Emmylou Harris curated a few years ago, a record that spearheaded the latest Parsons craze in the ever-expanding alt-country biosphere. I have no doubt that he could’ve…
