Though their résumés read differently–ex-shoegazers from England at one end, erstwhile alt-country bard from Massachusetts on the other–both Mojave 3 and Joe Pernice have found an auburn redemption in the strummy elixir of Big Star-styled pop. Excuses for Travellers, ex-Slowdive front man Neil Halstead’s third album of lazy, free-floating rehab-core,…

Thoughts of birds and whatever cloud my brain. I can see some through the window, which I guess explains it, but mostly I’m thinking that Iceland, I bet, looks nothing like Texas. The birds are getting to my brain through my ears, and they’re getting there through my headphones, which…

Tom Tom Club: I’ve always had a thing for smart people making dumb music. Not like Weird Al Yankovic (smart person making smart music) or Britney Spears (smart mom making dumb daughter make dumb music), but like Devo, where half the show is finding out where the show starts. Or…

“It’s like my mind is this constant movie,” Damien Jurado says on the phone from his home in Seattle, a few hours before he heads to work at a local daycare. “My mind is always developing certain characters. It’s just like any other writer; you get these ideas, like little…

Death Cab for Cutie are welcoming winter with open arms. Witness: Within the last few months, singer Ben Gibbard got hit by a car while riding his bike. Guitarist Chris Walla broke his foot. Bassist Nick Harmer was blinded for a few days when a cable whipped him in the…

Milwaukee and San Diego are, respectively, not that far and pretty damned far from Chicago. Yet you wouldn’t know that from the sound of the latest records by Pele and Tristeza. Both bands bank on the Windy City’s current calling card–in short, the noodly, guitar-based instrumental music a friend calls…

Here we have an interesting bill: three bands that started out as hungry ones with blue stars in their eyes that have deliquesced into fleshy middle-aged inurgency, making music not for the kids who once listened (or they once were), but for adults searching for the soundtrack to their undoing.Well,…

You should know that Sunday’s Best has ruined emo. I tell you this because they won’t. They’ll probably tell you that they’re sensitive young men who’ve had their hearts bruised by feminine wiles–a couple of times, actually–but they’ll leave out the part where they use the same bruised hearts to…

The reason I don’t like Moby isn’t because Play, his steam-gathering smash record from last year, pillages from the past and calls it the present. Some folks had problems with the fact that samples of anthropologist Alan Lomax’s field recordings made up the bulk of the record, claiming that Moby…

If the Cardigans were, as their third album claimed, the first band on the moon, Tahiti 80 are that little car the astronauts drove in while they were hanging up there: unnecessary but a hell of a lot of fun. Puzzle, the Paris band’s just-released debut, is a superb post-modern…

The thing that gets me about Hot Young Glaswegian Rockers Travis is that they’ve built their highly orchestrated American breakthrough on the backs of 15-year-old girls whose idea of high fashion is the Delia’s catalog. When Good Feeling, the band’s quite alright debut, was released in 1997, no one here…

The Get Up Kids, it seems, have gotten up. I’m on the phone with singer-guitarist Matt Pryor. He’s in Seattle, a few hours before his band’s show at Graceland, standing on a bustling street corner in front of the Dionysian bus he and his four bandmates sleep and eat and…

The thing I like about the Dave Matthews Band is the same thing I like about Phish and Korn and Aimee Mann and Fugazi: the grass roots, baby. These are guys that have built their fame from the ground, strategically and tirelessly touring for years, low on cash but high…

FastballI suspect that the first time Fastball assembled itself in one of its three members’ garages, the sparks flew. It’s a cinch to see the guys knocking back a couple of cold ones toward the end of a particularly stifling Austin scorcher while the Replacements and Elvis Costello and Big…

I don’t adhere to any stoner-rock rules or bylaws,” Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme sneers, leveling in one fell swoop the burgeoning mini-genre that has sprung up around his feet. “You call it stoner rock if you want, but that’s got nothing to do with me.” Yowza…

Deftones First things first: White Pony, the just-released third album by Sacramento new-metal act the Deftones, does not belong on the shelf next to stuff by Radiohead or Fugazi, despite what Maverick Records or a few overzealous critics may have told you. It’s simply too unrealized and showy and self-consciously…

“Beethoven is my hero,” Jeremy Enigk, Sunny Day Real Estate’s frontman, says. “I mean, writing a song on his deathbed–that’s beautiful to me.” He pauses, reflecting on what’s placed him on one end of the phone and me on the other. “And that’s kind of why I do it: For…