This brother-sister blues-punk combo might be the most exciting band currently connected to New York’s new rock scene: On Gallowsbird’s Bark, their debut, Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger rough up quick-and-dirty garagisms with brainy science-kid banter, inappropriate sexual tension and the kind of left-field musical accents Jack White probably views as…

Beneath the feathers and glitter and makeup and leather, the Darkness are smart guys. In relaunching popwise hair metal for an age in need of a little heart, they didn’t overlook the miskept form’s secret ingredient: not guitar-god muscle but the lyrical and melodic sweetness that enabled creeps like Bret…

Tenderhearted indie pop’s certainly not without its share of bright-eyed wunderkinder; investigate vintage work by youngsters Ben Lee, Ash and Kleenex Girl Wonder for sharp melodies voiced through rapidly deepening voices. Dallas has produced a few high-profile prodigies in Eisley and Ben Kweller, who’ve both won national acclaim for recent…

Jonathan Richman’s done a pretty bad job in recent years of exploiting the renown he earned for his performance in 1998’s Cameron Diaz blockbuster There’s Something About Mary (and by “renown” I mean viewers wondering, “Who the hell’s that creepy curly-haired guy playing guitar?”). Consider the singing-songwriting milquetoasts who have…

Wayne Hancock isn’t one of those alt-country stars to whom roots-music fans turn for the red-blooded emotion so many tin-eared grouches insist is missing from Nashville-produced radio fodder. On A-Town Blues, Hancock’s most recent studio album, Wayne “The Train” Hancock sings, “I’m sorry, darlin’, that I hurt you so/I don’t…

East L.A.’s greatest-ever band has so far spent the 21st century backing away from the formal and textural experimentation that marked the work the group did in the 1990s. In 2002, Good Morning Aztlán winningly showcased the band’s roots–a hard, Latin-keyed rock and soul with plenty of swing–but felt a…

These New York-based indie-rockers (recently relocated from Chicago, where they recorded both their albums at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio complex) figure there’s no reason you can’t work up a dense lather of electric-guitar distortion in one song and reduce another to a few plucked notes beneath a pretty harmony-vocal…

Semi-stranded in the Czech Republic in April 2002, I found succor in Canadian crooner Diana Krall’s The Look of Love, an easy-riding pop-jazz confection that feels like a million bucks when you’re staring down your third meal of conspicuously vegetable-free goulash a fellow traveler more accurately dubbed “oil soup.” Pre-Norah…

Last year Alabama’s Drive-By Truckers wooed a nation of hipsters with their terrific Decoration Day, an album of Southern hard-luck stories told with you-are-there detail and delivered with there-you-are muscle. From the sound of Welcome to the Woods, their major-label debut, Atlanta’s Lost Trailers would like to seduce those same…

You know how in TV shows about high school, like Saved by the Bell or Beverly Hills, 90210, the students never seemed to get older? Instead they just cycled through the same conflicts and issues with no attention paid to the way time seems to fly during those years. How,…

Who knew Gavin Rossdale inspired such animosity within the punk community? Sure, Bush’s flashy grunge fluff refigured Kurt Cobain’s hard-won angst into product for junior high mall stalkers, and, yeah, getting militant noisenik Steve Albini to produce 1996’s Razorblade Suitcase was kind of a coup. But 26 tracks dedicated to…

Like the Strokes and the Rapture before them, these well-dressed Scots make an effortlessly stylish sound. On their buzzed-about debut they underpin scratchy guitar fuzz with insistent disco beats and body-rocking bass lines, while singer Alex Kapranos oozes the sophisticated, world-weary charm of a young man who’s been to too…

Margerine Eclipse, the latest from English-French groove outfit Stereolab, offers the same pleasure as a handful of the band’s most recent albums: meticulously manicured sounds carefully assembled into songs that exist principally to showcase their constituent parts. The band’s members don’t seem entirely comfortable with this fact, since they’re always…

Long Island native Mindy Smith has done time as a cog in the Nashville machine, but her debut, One Moment More, doesn’t sound much like country music, despite its liberal use of back-porch acoustic guitar and weepy-eyed lap steel. Instead, Smith’s a member of the widening field of singer/songwriters who’ve…

When I caught up with Ben Kweller a couple of years ago, shortly after the release of his first solo album, Sha Sha, he talked about how great it was to make music without the burden of the record-biz machinations that practically defined the first phase of his music career…

Wherefore art thou, Elephant 6? Just a handful of years ago you couldn’t tune into an American college radio station without drowning in the paisley poesy churned out by this loose collective of indie-popsters; bands like Athens’ psychedelic collagists Olivia Tremor Control and Denver’s supermelodic strummers Apples in Stereo imagined…

These scruffy Scottish lads understand that the gentle, Belle & Sebastian-like folk-pop on their first two albums tends to be a bigger hit with critics than with folks who actually purchase CDs at record stores. So for Final Straw, their hit-at-home third, they’ve muscled up their sound so it lands…

Rough week at work? Kids (or parents) yelling at you? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind break your brain? Head to Gypsy Tea Room on Monday night, where these two singer/songwriters will be gingerly strumming their acoustic guitars and trying to soothe their own bottomless aches–but in a nice sort…

It’s easy to imagine curly-haired Canadian Ron Sexsmith writing and recording little neoclassical-pop masterpieces for the rest of his life, long after the modest critical and commercial rewards he’s won have faded. His songs sport hooks within hooks, highlight his slightly pinched regular-schlub voice and come wrapped in the kind…

I’m part of a small group of music fans holding out hope that someday, 10,000 Hz Legend will be recognized as the overlooked masterpiece that it so obviously is. The second proper album by chilled-out French keyboard maestros Air, Legend is a darker, weirder piece of work than the duo’s…

If I’d read only one or two of the 847 magazine stories that attempt to illuminate the screamo scene for the parents of junior high kids with pictures of Bert McCracken on their walls, I’d dig it. Screaming, emotions, eccentric front men given to onstage acrobatics more involving than the…

I’d already been disappointed by one Saddle Creek spin-off project this year–Desaparecidos guitarist Denver Dalley’s mushy synth-pop disc Statistics–when the Elected’s Sub Pop debut landed in my mailbox. But instead of sucking, Me First, a dreamy little album by Rilo Kiley guitarist Blake Sennett’s loose bunch of Los Angeles space…