In emo rock years, Hot Water Music and Bouncing Souls should be swigging bottles of Centrum Silver. Jersey boys Bouncing Souls formed while its members were still in high school in the late ’80s, playing manic three-chord nuggets dedicated to their favorite teen movies, BMX bikes and tour high jinks–although…

As almost every one-hit wonder or label-jilted band can tell you, the vicissitudes of the music industry work in mysterious ways. Just ask the Los Angeles quartet Metric, who found their space-age synthpop tune “Grow Up and Blow Away” featured prominently in a Polaroid commercial even as their Stephen Hague-produced…

Like many British bands who find stateside success, The Cure has a reputation in America that eschews its darker facets. The band’s first British top 40 single, the claustrophobic “A Forest,” typified the grinding gloom and skeletal danse macabre of its early-’80s albums Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography. Yet when…

Although prefab teen pop is no longer a dominant force in the cultural zeitgeist, the idea of musical authenticity still overshadows the popular canon. Are shaggy hipster bands really starving Lower East Side garage rats, or does Daddy bankroll their bohemian, post-liberal arts lives? Do pretty girls still validate the…

Sometimes the version of history that never happened is as interesting as the one that did. No Thanks!, the new four-CD punk-rock retrospective from Rhino, was originally called the wide-open-to-interpretation Ever Get the Feeling You’ve Been Cheated? Was it a reference to the fact that the almighty Sex Pistols, whose…

People call Duran Duran many things–decadent pretty boys, ridiculous new romantics, washed-up has-beens–but often overlooked is how their sense of savvy always superseded their savoir faire. The fab five rejuvenated disco’s slick beats with sleek Roxy Music- and Bowie-modeled art funk that made sophisticated rock palatable to teenyboppers. They also…

As 1999’s melancholy suicide note “Adam’s Song” revealed, the boys in Blink-182 have always been more than just pop-punk pranksters delighting in fart jokes, masturbation puns and Peter Pan syndrome. The Southern California trio stresses this often during Blink-182, a drastic departure from previous albums that elevates the band beyond…

Labeling an artist a fluffy light-rock Muzakhead is the kiss of death for musical credibility, conjuring nightmarish visions of Air Supply and other somnolent saps. But there’s no denying that the music of Brits Dido and Travis doesn’t exactly ooze testosterone. Dido’s breezy “Thank You,” sampled by Eminem for “Stan,”…

If Avril Lavigne and her strip-mall punk peers hold any aspirations of career longevity, they would do well to pay attention to the musical trajectory of Irish rockers Ash. Beginning in the mid-’90s as a scruffy adolescent trio with a fondness for the Buzzcocks, Green Day and songs about “Hulk…

The Gossip’s bassless counterparts, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the White Stripes, favor gritty blues flavored by their urban digs. But this Arkansas-via-Olympia, Washington, trio testifies as if it were at a garage-rock gospel revival fueled by Southern soul. Movement, their second effort, shakes mightily with swampy rumblings from guitarist…