Ghetto Fame-Us has a new record in the can, And Then There Was Us!, a long-gestating sequel to 1999’s Add On! (We’re generally not fans of exclamation points in album titles, but Ghetto Fame-Us has had to work so hard just to get these things out, slack must be cut.)…

Steven Collins found what he was looking for at an abandoned Mexican porn theater an hour or so outside Los Angeles, 60 miles south on the seedy side of sleepy Oxnard. Or he thought he would, anyway. That was the plan. Where he ended up was just as strange a…

Best new band we’ve come across in a while: Robot Monster Weekend. Performing here and there since late last year, Robot Monster Weekend recently released its debut EP, the six-song Turn Down Your Sorrow It’s…Robot Monster Weekend, recorded at The Echo Lab with Matt Barnhart. Singer-guitarists Mike Gargiulo and Aaron…

Everyone should have been asleep by then or, at least, getting there, and most had called it a night long ago, stumbling back to their hotels and homes. It was late even by rock-and-roll standards, closing in on 5 a.m., but no one inside Austin’s new Acoustic Café was ready…

[DARYL] and Slowride’s month-and-change tour of the better part of the country makes a pit stop in Dallas on May 2 so the bands can toast their new (or pretty close, anyway) records before heading to the West Coast. (Both bands, along with Lewis, will also perform at Good Records…

It’s easy to make Damian Higgins laugh. Doesn’t take much effort at all, really. The key, as it turns out, is to question how much work it actually takes to put together a mix CD or, specifically, doubt the amount of work it takes him to assemble one. He’s not…

Buncha benefits happening around D-D-FW this week and next. First up is a shindig for the Denton Humane Society at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios on April 27, featuring performances by Will Johnson and Scott Danbom of Centro-matic, The Baptist Generals, Failure Plus and Southpaw Preachers, with all proceeds going to…

Tony Hajjar is in Vancouver, recording a new album with his band, which is exactly where he should be and not where you’d expect. Let’s back up. In 2000, At the Drive-In, an El Paso quintet featuring Hajjar on drums, released Relationship of Command, the group’s fourth album and the…

In 1998, around the time Painted From Memory–his team-up with Burt Bacharach–hit stores, Elvis Costello gave up on the idea of playing rock and roll, or so he said. But he didn’t really need to put it in words: Costello had already spent much of the 1990s taking sidesteps, sparring…

The D.O.C. has spoken openly and often about his desire to put Dallas hip-hop on the map. Which isn’t exactly a new goal: Area hip-hop acts have been placing calls to Rand McNally for at least a decade, and while some have come close (say, Mad Flava, maybe, or Nemesis),…

The man on the phone, M. Sayyid of Antipop Consortium, is furious. A minute into the conversation, he’s spitting out words for distance and accuracy; his voice is one part disbelief, two parts disgust, with a twist of disappointment. He’s tired of thinking about when DMX left the group awhile…

Took awhile to get around to this, and now I remember why: I liked this better when it was called Flickerstick’s Welcoming Home the Astronauts. Actually, take that back–I didn’t. Starting now, a five-year moratorium on bands listening to Radiohead’s The Bends and/or OK Computer. It’s doing more harm than…

When we were at South by Southwest a couple of weeks ago, we ran into a few people who told us they’d had trouble getting electronic acts booked into the Dallas-Fort Worth area. While that may be true for some, as far as we can tell, there doesn’t seem to…

Backed by industry vet Terry McGill’s Dallas-based Major Money Entertainment, Psy2ko and Mic L. Moodswing–the self-styled “2002 version of Pac and B.I.G.”–are the latest locals to attempt a quadruple bypass of major-label heartaches, hustling to make a name for themselves (and Dallas hip-hop) with their own ink. It’s a point…

Andy Richardson is 17 years old, a student at North Mesquite High School in Mesquite, a skinny kid just this side of geeky who plays guitar in a band just this side of punk rock called Dogs in Heat. He’s also a “buzzer,” one of a few hundred high school…

Cranky singer-songwriter James McMurtry once dismissed Pleasant Grove, his opening act, from the Sons of Hermann Hall stage, calling the band’s music “Seattle alt-country bullshit.” He claimed if you wanted the real deal, you’d be best served checking out Deadman instead. Huh. While it’s a good idea–we’d even say it’s…

We’d been in Austin maybe an hour, been at the convention center for less than half that time, when we were approached by two young girls, out of their teens by a few seconds, if that. They looked like just another pair of volunteers, two more of the dozens of…

By the time you read this, dear reader, we will be hip-deep in free hooch, assaulting our innards with various stripes and strengths of liquors, doing untold damage to our liver and kidneys and God knows what else for years to come. The hangover will be stupendous though, fortunately, slow…

The problem was, Josh Rouse was from Nashville. Well, he wasn’t from there, but that’s where he lived then, and where he lives now. And he sang and played guitar, sometimes an acoustic, wrote his own songs, wasn’t in a band. It all added up to a paint-by-numbers portrait that…

Ben Kweller stares at the row of posters taped along a wall inside Fort Worth’s Ridglea Theater, six or seven of the same make and model: an oversized reproduction of the cover of his new album, Sha Sha, a close-up of his face with a red toothbrush jammed in his…