Another week, another pale quartet from England looking to sneak into American record buyers’ hearts before Coldplay’s upcoming album. Manchester’s Long-View are well-meaning chaps: Like fellow Manc-rock outfits Doves and Elbow, they’ve responded to what they no doubt view as a cheapening of musical values–in the band’s bio, singer Rob…

Guthrie is heiress to the American folk dynasty–Dad is Arlo, Grandpa’s Woody. Irion used to play in a couple of also-ran South Carolina indie bands. Together they’re both a married couple and the duo behind a new album called Exploration that likely won’t blow up your skirt but likably capitalizes…

Like the Futureheads, Scotland’s Dogs Die in Hot Cars is ensuring that XTC gets its fair due in the current Britpop revival. On Please Describe Yourself, the group’s exuberant debut, DDIHC sings about Paul Newman’s eyes, having no need for a barbershop and loving Lucy Liu, all over tightly arranged…

Trial of the Century, the sophomore album by New York’s French Kicks, didn’t get the attention it deserved from Spoon fans enamored of that group’s taut white-soul indie rock. Live, the band cranks up to a steady simmer only suggested by the record, while front man Nick Stumpf works his…

The good-looking young men in Kings of Leon seem to exert a lot of energy making sure they appear to be living the rock-and-roll dream: In an icky new Rolling Stone fashion spread they can’t get their grubby hands inside enough gold lamé bras. Yet when you listen to the…

During his tenure fronting North Carolina’s Archers of Loaf, Eric Bachmann made sure his group never sank too deeply into the guitar-band monotony so many indie acts are all too happy to propagate. By the Archers’ last album, 1998’s White Trash Heroes, he’d twisted their post-Superchunk blare into dark, noisy…

What Missy Elliott and Timbaland are to future-shock hip-hop, these two are to neo-soul R&B right now: populists whose thirst for formal innovation never threatens a deep-seated desire to rock the radio. Though The Diary of Alicia Keys includes a few too many pages for me to make it all…

The fifth album by Australian indie-pop wunderkind Ben Lee sports the crappiest title since, oh, Operation: Mindcrime. But give the guy a break: Last year he broke up with longtime girlfriend Claire Danes, then got to watch her fall in love with Billy Crudup, a handsome older man who could…

Indie rock thrives deep in the heart of Texas tonight. Centro-matic front man Will Johnson has more songs in him than bands to play them, and though Centro-matic’s current tour commemorates no newer album than 2003’s sweet, shaggy Love You Just the Same, you can bet on hearing your share…

Only a publicist or a close relative would claim that Astronaut, the new album by the newly reunited Duran Duran, is comparable to the veteran English synth-rock group’s classic 1980s records. Nothing on Astronaut inhabits the same galaxy as “Rio,” “Hungry Like the Wolf” or even “Ordinary World,” although the…

With their delectable debut last year, New York’s Scissor Sisters proved how far beyond electroclash they’d come since singer Jake Shears and multi-instrumentalist Babydaddy first started playing off-the-cuff shows around their adopted hometown nearly four years ago. For example, they write songs now–good ones, with choruses and everything! This DVD…

“Human hearts and pain should never be separate,” Jason Molina sings in “The Dark Don’t Hide It,” the first song on this live CD by his Bloomington, Indiana-based group Magnolia Electric Co. That’s a pretty handy crystallization of Molina’s work over the past decade, both with Magnolia and with Songs:…

The American heartland has been unfairly deprived of its share of plainspoken, homegrown frat-dude acoustic-guitar troubadours. Good ones, I mean. Minnesota’s Mason Jennings aims to fix that: On his lovely Use Your Voice, he makes like a Midwestern Jack Johnson, singing simple, tuneful little ditties about lowercase concerns in a…

Leave it to Steve Earle to make a rock-the-vote record that sounds as good in the cold light of Bush II as it did last fall. “Voting is vital,” Earle writes in The Revolution Starts Now’s liner notes, “but in times like these voting alone simply isn’t enough.” So he…

Andrew Bird is a singer-songwriter and violinist-for-hire who spent some time in the late ’90s with quirky swing-band revivalists the Squirrel Nut Zippers. A few years ago, he moved from Chicago to a northwestern Illinois farming community where his family owned a barn, which he fancied turning into a recording…

Something Corporate rose to mall-rock prominence with “If You C Jordan,” a spiteful piano-pop ditty about an annoying kid at school whom singer Andrew McMahon branded a “little redhead bitch.” If there’s one thing worse than a bully, it’s a bully pretending to be a sensitive guy in order to…

Here’s a family affair for indie rockers looking for proof that “settling down” doesn’t necessarily equal a creative death. Cex is Rjyan Kidwell, a young, smart guy who has played satirical glitch-techno, earnest emo-glitch, wry art-techno, menacing goth-rock and whatever he’ll give you tonight. He recently married Roby Newton, formerly…

The post-Radiohead saturation of grandly emotional English guitar-rock bands has pretty much been defined by a trend toward ever-greater wimpiness: Technophobic Radiohead begat rain-phobic Travis begat girl-phobic Coldplay begat Keane, who are actually afraid of guitars themselves and so therefore made Hopes and Fears, their debut, with a piano instead…

To be taken under the wing of Nic Harcourt, the mastermind behind the tastemaking L.A. public-radio show Morning Becomes Eclectic, you need do one of three things: 1. Write gently melodic songs about moral uplift and the triumph of the human spirit. 2. Fold into your music mild hints of…

Despite the award’s legendary meaninglessness, being nominated for a Grammy can throw anyone for a loop. Suddenly, folks who would never give your record a look give it multiple listens; music-biz creeps start sniffing around, hungry for opportunity; forgotten high school chums emerge from the woodwork in search of a…

Portland’s Thermals remember a time when indie rock meant plugging in and making a noise as loud as your anger, or as vibrant as your excitement, or as jittery as your anxiety. Fuckin A, their second album, sounds like Superchunk back before the strings came in: short, sharp blasts of…

Orange County’s Eighteen Visions don’t quite manage the stylistic breadth their name implies on their major-label debut, Obsession, but for emo-metal, they’re way ahead of the curve. Expanding outward from a base of the straight-edge hardcore that originally inspired them to forgo the teenage traditions of drug and drink, they…