As his day job, John Vanderslice runs San Francisco’s Tiny Telephone recording studio, which features a Neve 5316 console, “the city’s most comfortable couch” and the staggering ability to boast that Erase Errata and Cex have spent time there. By night (or perhaps late afternoon), Vanderslice makes compelling indie-rock records…

Unquestionably the reunion story of the year–unless Siegfried & Roy pull one out before Christmas–the return of the Pixies will, if we’re lucky, convince Black Francis, Kim Deal, Joey Santiago and David Lovering to put their heads together and write new songs that don’t suck, picking up where the sorely…

Split the Difference, the fourth album by trippy English roots-rockers Gomez, doesn’t feature much in the way of songs. Holed up in the studio with master producer Tchad Blake (of Los Lobos side project Latin Playboys), they seemed to have placed a bigger emphasis on texture than tune, tricking out…

Elvis Costello’s never shied away from making genre records–there is a country one (Almost Blue), a fake-classical one (The Juliet Letters), an easy-listening one (Painted From Memory, with Burt Bacharach), even a crappy piano-bar one (last year’s North). Remarkably, he has shied away from sounding like a dilettante; his enthusiasm…

Refill your Zippos before heading out tonight, ladies: These three indie troubadours will do everything they can to get you to hoist a flickering flame to their sensitive acoustic sounds. After a star-making year including boozy kisses with Winona Ryder and The New York Times’ labeling him the new Dylan…

You gotta love Jay-Z’s logic: When he and R. Kelly released their not-inaccurately titled collaborative album The Best of Both Worlds in 2002, Jay declined to tour with the R&B singer after the surfacing of child-pornography charges that have threatened to eclipse Kelly’s musical activities for the last two years…

As one-half of the Canadian electro-pop duo the Junior Boys, singer Jeremy Greenspan hardly lives a debauched rock-and-roll lifestyle. “I’m actually quite even-tempered,” he says on the phone from his home in Hamilton, Ontario. A joint major in computer sciences and comparative literature, Greenspan says, “I thought I’d have a…

It’d be easy to assume that the press attention and record-biz hype showered on Omaha’s indie-rock scene are what’s fueled the artistic hubris of the city’s acts–Bright Eyes’ short-story-length album titles and upcoming double CD, Tim Kasher’s dual leadership of Cursive and the Good Life, the Faint’s naming a song…

Like so many shaggy-haired roots-rockers before him, Montreal’s Sam Roberts writes songs about meeting cold, cold girls and finding himself on the road to confusion, then plays them like the only thing he’s unsure of is the number of drinks to order from the bar before last call. On We…

Reduced to hard, cold factoids, Tegan and Sara sound like they were dreamed up by a focus group convened in an alternate-universe shopping-mall food court: two Canadian sisters, both lesbians, who play zippy folk-pop with careful harmonies out of the Indigo Girls songbook, clipped guitar strums cribbed from Elastica’s first…

When greased-up SoCal punks Social Distortion release Sex, Love and Rock ‘n’ Roll on Tuesday, it will be the first time they’ve issued a studio album in eight years. But from the sound of Sex, it could’ve just as easily been 18 or 80; that’s how close frontman Mike Ness…

Kansas City’s the Anniversary tweaked emo tradition in two ways: 1. They had a female singer, which meant frontman Josh Berwanger could only pull off so much girls-are-mean before Adrianne Pope would defend her kind, and 2. They were willing to grow, going from synth-pop cuties to prog-rock scaries in…

Richmond, Virginia’s Lamb of God is a refreshing anomaly in the world of mainstream metal. They love a swinging 6/8 beat more than a solid 4/4 thud, they feature a clean-shaven guy with short hair, and on Ashes of the Wake, their third album, they espouse a staunchly anti-Dubya, heartily…

Allow me to present a new drinking game for your consideration: Acquire one CD by the Canadian power-pop band Sloan. (It doesn’t matter which one, though I’d suggest 1998’s Navy Blues if your goal is to get drunk as quickly as possible. To go a little slower, try the new…

Though front man Brandon Boyd’s lyrics on current album A Crow Left of the Murder leave something to be desired–you know, sense–I wouldn’t mind at all if California’s Incubus becomes a model for the modern alt-metal band: They muster muscular daybreak guitar fuzz without forgoing pretty parts or roses on…

It’s that time of year again: another Drive-By Truckers album, another wad of lyrically incisive, liberally rocking Southern-fried swamp-rock. Last year’s Decoration Day saw the Truckers selling their local morality tales to an increasingly universal audience hungry for “authenticity” accented by uplift and hope. The Dirty South, as the title…

The sadly incoherent old-man bullshit spewed by Nick Hornby in his recent New York Times op-ed tribute to Philadelphia pub-rockers Marah wasn’t only annoying to humans who listen to music for more than a reminder that the 1960s have been over for longer than they happened. It was also in…

I’d pretty much gotten over Phantom Planet’s cute-guy L.A. indie-rock when Fox started showing these teasers for the second season of The O.C. with the band’s “California” as the soundtrack. That made me remember what a good tune “California,” off 2002’s The Guest, is, and that the people who made…

This spunky Hollywood pop-rock outfit boasts not one but two former child actors: singer Jenny Lewis, who made Shelley Long feel like a good mom in Troop Beverly Hills, and guitarist Blake Sennett, who somehow survived a four-year stint in the cast of Boy Meets World. (The band also boasts…

Actor/writer/director Zach Braff’s Garden State is the cinematic equivalent of good emo. In the film his characters don’t do much but talk about their feelings, yet their interactions can uncover tremendous reserves of emotion. In putting together his movie’s soundtrack, Braff didn’t go looking for good emo; this is probably…

My only real complaint with the new school of young neoconservative crooners is that they’re so damn conservative in their choice of repertoire. That 23-year-old Josh Groban–the curly-haired straight guy to Michael Bublé’s pompadoured wiseacre–can sing is beyond question, and in all the morning-show radio interviews I’ve heard him do…

Each of these three Latin dance bands is worth seeing on its own; that they’ve joined forces is no doubt evidence of our shitty economy, but whatever–it’s your gain. L.A.’s Ozomatli adds lots of Middle Eastern flavor to their funky fusion on the new Street Signs, making sure to piss…