Method Man and Redman No telling how Dave Matthews and Little Feat both managed to end up on Method Man and Redman’s recent collaboration Blackout!, except for the fact that both Men smoke more pot than most of the red-eyed fans at one of Matthews’ concerts; the disc has more…

The Get Up Kids The lyrics to “Red Letter Day,” off The Get Up Kids’ just-released sophomore album Something to Write Home About, don’t stand out from the rest of the songs on the disc. The song seems to tell the story of yet another broken heart, one more high…

It all made sense at the time, and to hear Melodica Festival founder Wanz Dover tell it, it still does. The annual festival had been left homeless when The Argo finally closed down after threatening to for months, so Dover decided to relocate to Austin. He had already planned on…

The Adventures of Jet Part 3: Coping With Insignificance (Space Age Records) Maybe it’s because singer-keyboard player Hop Litzwire, drummer Rob Avsharian, bassist Tony Jannotta, and guitarist Jason Weisenburg keep changing their name, from Bobgoblin to The Commercials to The Adventures of Jet in less than two years. Or it…

Luscious Jackson, Ben Lee This bill could have been titled the Grand Royal Showcase of Failed Potential, if only Sean Lennon, Butter O8, and the Beastie Boys themselves were along for the ride. Grand Royal is still the hippest label around, but its rep was earned three or four years…

For every Funland, whose members have repeatedly turned down lucrative offers to reunite for just one show, there’s a New Bohemians, back together to perform at Gypsy Tea Room on October 23, and reportedly, set to return to the studio to record their first new album in almost a decade…

Most of Ani DiFranco’s sentences don’t end so much as they drift away, sometimes bumping into another thought, usually plunging the conversation into uncomfortable silence, the kind of quiet that comes when two former friends run into each other for the first time in years and neither has anything to…

Dance Hall Crashers Nine years and four albums (including the recently released Purr, but not counting two subsequent reissues of its 1990 debut) into its career, Dance Hall Crashers is still mainly known for the fact that Operation Ivy’s Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman started the band before going on…

Elvis Costello with Steve Nieve It would make more sense if Elvis Costello were coming to Starplex Amphitheatre with a band, any band, rather than just his acoustic guitar and former Attraction Steve Nieve and his piano. It might not be better, but it would definitely be more appropriate. Starplex…

The food court at Valley View Mall is crowded, even for a Saturday morning. Hundreds of people are milling around, and none of them is here today to shop. The mall’s security guards obviously weren’t expecting this many people to be here, and though it’s not yet 11 a.m., it’s…

Bill Bentley never met Alexander “Skip” Spence, never even spoke with the man whose music meant so much to him. He had come close before, when Spence’s erstwhile band, Moby Grape, played at the Catacomb Club in Bentley’s hometown of Houston. But Spence wasn’t there that night, kept off the…

Scattergun Reflex laughing at a dead man (Laser Trax Records) All too often, bands are defined by recommended-if-you-like comparisons, first impressions that stick around long enough to pick up negative connotations. Influences become indictments, the end of a sentence that begins, “They’re just ripping off…” It’s certainly difficult to avoid…

Jon Randall is thinking about moving back to Dallas, coming home after 12 years in Nashville spent working on other people’s projects while watching his own fall apart. Well, he doesn’t say the last part, but it’s not too hard to finish his sentence. It’s a story that’s all too…

At the time, no one could have known how important Nirvana’s appearance on Saturday Night Live would be, how many bands would form in its wake, how different the world would sound soon after it happened. Nirvana was just another band on the way up that Saturday Night Live was…

At the beginning of this year, Momus (known around the house as Nick Currie) began soliciting participants for a “portrait album” he was calling Stars Forever. The idea: People would give Momus $1,000 to write and record a song about them, and they would become “stars forever” when he released…

Bruce Goldberg doesn’t have much time to talk. Every few minutes, the phone begins beeping incessantly, meaning someone on the other line is placing an order. And if the other line isn’t ringing, one of his six full-time employees is trying to get his attention so they can fill an…

A friend of mine believes Tori Amos is some sort of cross between the Pied Piper and Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate. That is, she plants secret buzzwords in her songs that have been helping her recruit an enormous army of young women in their late teens and early…

Ask The Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands which band has had the biggest impact on him and his music, and his answer begins before the question ends — New Order, he declares, no hesitation or hedging necessary. Actually, what he says is Norder, his response so quick that it catches his…

Never quite understood why Calways frontman Todd Deatherage idolized Tom Petty so much. Why would someone with Deatherage’s voice and songwriting ability deify a man who has always sounded as though he’s singing out of Dylan’s nose while recycling the same Keith Richards-by-way-of-Roger McGuinn riff? Sure, it’s fine to marvel…

Any band that borrowed its name from a bit of dialogue found in The Karate Kid’s climactic fight scene should be, by all rights, easy to define. It’s the kind of ironic moniker that would fit right in with the SoCal punk-pop crowd, one of those start-stop descendants of the…

When Brett Tohlen and Matt Beaton say that their band Lewis has been luckier than most, they don’t mean to imply that the group hasn’t had to struggle. Far from it actually, since the first four years of Lewis’ existence were nothing but an uphill climb. After all, three-fourths of…

It’s never too late for a comeback in rock and roll: Every has-been is one fluke hit away from being a still-is. Yet even with that in mind, They Might Be Giants is perhaps an unlikely candidate for a resurgence, although it might be too soon to term the group’s…