Despite an endless audience for radio-friendly music, most pop-oriented artists eventually become bored with straightforward pop-music structures–a tradition that’s been carried down from the Beatles to Christina Aguilera. And really, who can blame them? Even though it’s one of the hardest things to construct, the pop hit is also the…

An eight-hour van drive in Texas sans air conditioning–at any time of year, really, but this is the summer we’re talking about–is hardly an ideal way to travel. That’s the scenario Sound Team guitarist Sam Sanford faces during a recent interview, right as the sextet begins a U.S. tour in…

Before the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O strutted, spit and cooed her way to indie-rock icon status, the last dynamic female to front a big-name rock band was arguably Courtney Love. After propelling Hole to stardom on landmark album Live Through This, she somewhat lost her cathartic bellow on the…

In the early days of Mogwai’s career, an album titled Mr. Beast would have matched the band’s Category 5 noise-hurricanes perfectly. But as the Scotsmen refined their sound over the next decade, moments of levity and clarity–airy synths, strings, eerie silences–made the band’s emotional maelstroms more compelling. In fact, Mr…

Matthew Caws cops to being the type of person who’s always wired, so perhaps it’s a good thing that the Nada Surf vocalist-guitarist is discussing the state of his band while walking to the gym–presumably so he can burn off some of this nervous energy. But there’s also something really…

The Strokes were labeled the saviors of N.Y.C.’s rock and roll scene when they oozed out of hipster enclaves (not to mention prep school) in 2001. But in the ensuing years, all of the tricks that made the fab five so exciting–snappy hooks, half-drunken confessions of love/lust and off-balance, VU-meets-AOR…

In a recent New York Times Magazine article that disputes the age-old link between creativity and depression, author Peter D. Kramer claims that it is “depression–and not resistance to it or recovery from it–that diminishes the self.” Devoted acolytes of Nine Inch Nails majordomo Trent Reznor would heartily disagree with…

It’s kind of absurd that the Fiery Furnaces, a brother-and-sister duo with only two albums to their name, are already releasing a collection of singles, B-sides and other ephemera. But in this pair’s warped world, where eight-minute songs pile as many disparate styles together as clothes at the local Goodwill,…

In 2004, the line between indie and mainstream rock disintegrated even faster than Britney Spears’s quickie Vegas marriage. Vinyl obsessives mingled with white-hat-wearing fratheads at Modest Mouse shows, Taking Back Sunday debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard charts, and Death Cab for Cutie earned O.C.-sanctioned buzz and a major-label…

If anyone else had recorded Speak, critics would regard the album as a credible hybrid of electro-throb, rocker-chick attitude and Top 40 ear candy. But because it’s recorded by Lindsay Lohan–she of the Disneyfied acting résumé, habitual tabloid appearances and barely legal status–many will dismiss it as nothing more than…

To those who feel American Idol represents the worst aspects of the pop-music assembly line, Kelly Clarkson is just another Mariah Carey clone. But the Burleson girl’s rags-to-riches story tugs at the part of us that finds something endearing about high school show choir, about an earnest soloist burning with…

American Idiot–widely described as a “punk-rock opera”–comes full circle, back to Green Day’s 1994 mainstream breakthrough Dookie. That album detailed the raging, Generation X boredom of teen punks; Idiot is ostensibly a chronicle of one of those burnouts 10 years later–still frustrated and angry, but this time having a quarter-life…

The long-awaited third EP in piano man Ben Folds’ mini-album trilogy–available only online at www.attackedbyplastic.com or by download–is a polarizing disc. Those unable to stomach his ivory-tickled smirk and ’70s rock impersonations will find Super D a painful listen. The somber introspection of “Kalamazoo” contains such lines as “How many…

When Robert Smith commissioned his nieces and nephews to scribble the artwork for the Cure’s new self-titled album, he had three simple requests for them: Draw a good dream, draw a bad dream and make sure to include the words “the Cure.” The results resemble the scrawled refrigerator art parents…

A Dallas native who recently returned to the area after living in California for the past three years, Havergal–the one-man band of Ryan Murphy–is also returning to record stores with a sophomore effort that treasures sparseness and repetition over traditional structures. The Bright Eyes-esque highlight “Drowned Men” runs on a…

Good Charlotte is one of the biggest bands in the United States right now, a pop-punk quintet that’s played the MTV Video Music Awards, graced the cover of Rolling Stone and sold more than 3 million copies of its last disc, The Young and the Hopeless. To Good Charlotte vocalist…

At their Boston show last week, the outfit worn by Psychedelic Furs front man Richard Butler–a chunky beaded necklace, dapper suit and secret-agent sunglasses–embodied his band’s descent into glossy rock purgatory. Formed in 1977, the Furs’ early albums were shadowy hurricanes of post-punk rebellion. Butler’s tar-smeared vocals matched the group’s…

In the 1980s, a teenage metalhead’s wet dream was the almighty package tour, where groupings like Poison/Ratt and Mötley Crüe/Whitesnake roamed arenas to overload fans with lighter anthems, raucous chords and pyrotechnics galore. Unsurprisingly, hair metal’s modern mainstream counterpart–the nebulously defined “pop-punk” bands–carries the hairspray torch proudly when it comes…

A person has to be fairly out-there to be too wacky for the Beta Band, the Scottish group prone to wearing flowing togas while crafting psychedelia fit for a pastoral bank holiday. Yet Gordon Anderson, a.k.a. the Lone Pigeon, a.k.a. one of the Beta Band’s founders, left the group because…

Trying to describe the sound of The Cooper Temple Clause is like trying to corral a 7-year-old who just ate an entire bag of Halloween candy. Oasis kidnapped by Nine Inch Nails and forced to sing karaoke to ear-shattering industrial tunes? The lovechild of Kurt Cobain and Placebo tinkering with…

These days, Lisa Loeb is having her cake and eating it, too. Literally. Besides a new album in the spring and a nationwide tour with beau Dweezil Zappa, Loeb is also co-host of a funky television show on the Food Network, Dweezil and Lisa. When I interviewed the pair over…

The Casual Dots sound exactly how you would expect a group associated with incestuous indie stalwart Kill Rock Stars to sound–which is both good and bad. Their debut’s jumble of angular guitar shards (“Derailing”), wobbly country torch songs (“I’ll Dry My Tears”) and slackjawed strumming (“Flowers”) maintains the un-self-conscious, thrown-together-in-a-weekend…