A virtual crash course in current Southern hip-hop, 97.9 The Beat’s holiday blowout rounds up an impressive array of Dixie’s hustle-and-flow men (and one woman) to remind us of the real reason for the season: cash! Headliner Young Jeezy–Atlanta’s 50 Cent, in more ways than one–has had quite a year,…

This year’s edition of American Idol–the show’s fourth season since igniting a tele-musical frenzy in 2002–was something of a triumph for the South: The program’s two finalists, Oklahoma native Carrie Underwood and Alabama-born Bo Bice, proved that Dixie denizens could compete with contestants from flashier locales, and that music with…

Dip into any scuzzy indie-punk dive right now, and you’re bound to bump into a noise-rock two-piece. They seem to spawn out of beer-stained floors all over the place these days, so it’s only a matter of time until the scene belches forth a duo with the potential to break…

Looking for a more intimate experience than sitting on Santa’s lap at the mall this holiday season? A Grown and Sexy Christmas brings three R&B smoothies–old-hand singer-producer Babyface, hard-body heartthrob Ginuwine and new-jack quartet Jagged Edge–to the Nokia for a night of heavy-breathing melodies, bump-and-grind rhythms and determined proclamations of…

In “Who You’d Be Today,” a slo-mo ballad from his new album, Kenny Chesney wonders what life would have dealt a handful of dead people if they hadn’t died. “It ain’t fair, you died too young,” he sings in weepy close harmony, “Like a story that had just begun.” Penned…

The conventional wisdom on A Bigger Bang is that it finds the Rolling Stones getting back in touch with their scrappy band-in-a-room roots, that they’re once again making the kind of no-frills rock that originally seduced the world while the Beatles were busy charming parents and variety-show hosts. But this…

Kate Bush’s latest arrives loaded with topical anticipation. The overdue follow-up to The Red Shoes, Aerial is the English dream-folk singer’s first album in more than a decade, a period in which her Mystical Art Woman persona was adapted to great commercial ends by Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan and other…

On her new Timeless, a self-produced collection of covers of classic country tunes, Martina McBride pays tribute to the music of her (and older people’s) past without trashing the present–a real accomplishment in C&W, where somebody’s notion of authenticity is always getting in the way of a good time. (Even…

Depeche Mode’s new album begins with a bang–15 seconds of harsh, grinding, construction-site screech seemingly designed to quell suspicions that these dance-rock elders have been softened by age and irrelevance. You can hardly begrudge them their determination; since 2001, when the trio released Exciter, their moody synth-pop moves have been…

Here’s the thing about comeback album titles that act like the album in question isn’t a comeback: The gimmick doesn’t work. On the first Backstreet Boys CD since the bottom fell out of boy bands a few years ago, the fab five try to convince us that Never Gone takes…

For the record, Efrem Schulz does not regularly hang with Gwen Stefani. “We’ve been to Europe and talked to people from magazines, and it’s really funny,” the front man of SoCal metalcore outfit Death by Stereo says on the phone from his home. “They’re like, ‘Oh, Orange County. So how…

Bay Area psych-rock freakazoids Comets on Fire do a pretty good job of blowing up your skirt on record. Blue Cathedral, their 2004 Sub Pop release, careens from ’60s folk strumming to full-blown noise-core sine waving more quickly than you can pack a bowl of, well, whatever. But the band…

Perhaps it’s thanks to some high-profile collaborators, but southern Gothic singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt compels in a way he hasn’t in years on Gothic Bells, the latest in a long series of albums by the prolific Georgian. Producer John Chelew, who’s worked similar magic on records by Charlie Musselwhite and the…

Kansas City-reared jazz singer Karrin Allyson isn’t quite as pop as some of her better-selling peers. Rather, she leans toward artists like Diana Krall–Allyson prefers to twist a melody in an unexpected direction rather than caress its well-worn edges à la Norah Jones. Still, she makes for a fine interpreter…

Like its Sub Pop labelmates The Shins, San Francisco’s Rogue Wave weaves enough inverted-world details into its tuneful guitar-pop on zippy debut Out of the Shadow. You’ll keep turning the songs over, wondering why something so obvious sounds so fresh, but the glockenspiel tinkles, warped-guitar whine and bird whistles add…

The cover of this London quartet’s 2003 debut, Vehicles & Animals, depicts a stairway of trash spiraling toward heaven–an apt visual metaphor for the band’s colorful sound, which cobbles together elements from American and English alt-rock of the past decade. (“El Salvador,” Vehicles’ opener, badly lifts a verse from Avril…

The 1960s might be dead in this Liverpool quartet’s world, but the late ’70s and early ’80s are alive and kicking on its self-titled debut, which evokes the sound of the Clash driving its train in vain into the Specials’ ghost town. The Dead 60s are yet another stylish post-post-punk…

Keane never thought this day would come. For the past two years, Coldplay fans dealt with the long wait for third album X&Y by listening to Keane, the British trio that delivers heartsick pop about looking at the sky, wishing a lover were near, feeling sorry for oneself, et al…

A few days before hitting Denton on her current headlining tour, former Helium front woman Mary Timony will have wrapped up a series of West Coast dates opening for Sleater-Kinney, which makes good sense: Like S-K on their latest, Timony stretches out on her new Ex Hex and unabashedly brings…

Aqualung is a polite British fellow called Matthew Hales. Like many other polite British fellows influenced by but not terribly interested in sounding like Thom Yorke, Hales plays introspective pop-rock ballads seductive to students, wedding planners and people who shop at Banana Republic (but not Old Navy). His American debut,…

Tooling around the Tower of London a few months ago, I had the pleasure of beholding a suit of armor worn by Henry VIII. The highlight? An enormous codpiece as large and irregularly shaped as a bean burrito from Taco Bell. Louis XIV should have named themselves Henry VIII: On…

This young Pennsylvania-based one-man band sports a pretty sweet Mohawk on the cover of its debut album, Patience and Science. But like Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba (who wears two full sleeves of tattoos), Richman seems to care only about punk rock inasmuch as it can provide a little distorted-guitar grit…