Soulful country balladeer Chely Wright might be too sexy for her own good. Her brand of country falls closer to Lucinda Williams than Faith Hill, but her sultry, wind-blown appearance belies some of the earthier elements of her music. Wright’s sixth effort, The Metropolitan Hotel, is full of thoughtful people…
In between tours with ascendant nautical metallers Mastodon and goth-chic pop-punkers Alkaline Trio, Death by Stereo headlines Dallas the day before the release of Death for Life, the Orange County metalcore outfit’s new album. Avenged Sevenfold fans anxiously awaiting that band’s terrific major-label debut would do well to bide their…
Reggie Watts’ voice is all Al Green, lilting yet dangerous, in control but ready to explode. As front man for this Seattle soul quintet, Watts has a presence that’s dominating yet still integrated into the cool grooves and spacious beats. “Say What You Mean,” Maktub’s third effort, is prime make-out…
Que Sara, Sara: Sara Radle lost this year’s Dallas Observer Music Award for best female vocalist to Stacy and Sherri Dupree from Eisley, so she’s packing her bags and moving to L.A. OK, so that’s not why, but Radle is relocating to the West Coast on June 6 to work…
This Austin foursome gets the shaft in some quarters for aping the Velvet Underground. Besides the delightfully amateurish pounding of drummer Elizabeth Nottingham, however, the Velvets tag doesn’t really hold sway. Travis Higdon’s vocals and guitar work are far more Tom Verlaine than Lou Reed, although switching one generation’s CBGB…
The last thing fans want to hear about a band’s new album is that it sounds a whole lot like the last one. Nobody wants to spend $15 on recycled songs and unoriginal material, right? Austin’s Spoon might be the ultimate exception to the rule, as the group’s latest, Gimme…
With a whisper of a voice, Craig Gurwich, the lone member of Summer at Shatter Creek, spins sedate tales of loneliness and obsession on the remote and affecting All the Answers. Singing like a postmodern Art Garfunkel, Gurwich specializes in the unexpected and infuses songs with just enough pulse to…
You don’t need a critic to probe John Darnielle like a frog in science class; the Mountain Goats front man spilled his guts long ago. Listening to his fantastically touching new album feels like digging through his childhood cedar chest, but what you’ll find, set against emotionally heavy piano and…
Jaw-dropping. Awesome. Near perfect. On Friday night, The Strange Boys deserved just about every one of those hyperboles. The Dallas trio sounded like the entire Nuggets box set squeezed into an ultra-concentrated, garage-rock smoothie, smack dab between the vigor of The Sonics and the mad science of The Monks. Eighteen-year-old…
Unlike other awards shows, you don’t need anything special to host the Dallas Observer Music Awards–talent, experience, Tony Danza. Nope, there’s really only one requirement for this job: You have to be me. I was the perfect candidate. The following is a condensed diary of the 2005 DOMAs that took…
In this day of media overload, it’s astonishing that vital music still remains unrecorded and largely unheard. But Matthew Johnson, a skinny white boy from Mississippi, found a heap in his own back yard. Turned on to blues by a University of Mississippi class taught in the late ’90s by…
There is a scene in Almost Famous in which young William Miller, a stand-in for the director and former Rolling Stone scribe Cameron Crowe, discovers a secret stash of LPs. In a different film, it could have been a stack of Playboys–the way William caresses each cover, reveling at the…
Is Why? the future of hip-hop or a singer-songwriter gone mad? Actually, he’s probably both. A member of San Francisco indie-rap conglomerate Anticon, Why? already proved himself a terribly weird rapper in a three-member project called cLOUDDEAD, whose spacey sounds and half-sung, super-slow rhymes have since been copped by British…
In 2003, Eisley had all the momentum in the world. That year saw the Tyler siblings shine with two amazing EPs, an opening slot touring with Coldplay and national press that included an MTV-produced “You Hear It First” promotion, and between every accolade for their dreamy pop songs and gorgeous…
It’s somewhat comforting to know that whatever disputes may rend big-bucks gangsta rap from time to time, Snoop Dogg most likely will be there, anxious to restore the peace but even more anxious to make a quick buck. So here he comes to town on tour with the Game, West…
They say in order to truly appreciate something, you have to let it go. That may be the case for lush, charismatic pop-rockers Mur, who left Big D last year for the temperate climes of Southern California. Each time they visit, they put together a show that is bigger and…
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…
Fine, fine, fine: You got to vote for everything this year–nominations, winners, the whole shebang–and I’m stuck here in my office with this lousy column and a 12-pack of Diet Dr Pepper. But two can play that game. (Well, technically, about 5,200 people can play that game, since that’s how…
In 2003, when noisy Brighton guitar rockers British Sea Power released their debut album and Canadian disco-folk chanteuse Leslie Feist was familiar only to indie-rock liner-note readers, this double bill would only have made much sense in a consideration of the underground’s relatively limited market share. Two years later, supporting…
Say what you will about your Arcade Fire and your Fiery Furnaces, but if it’s indie that looks beyond itself for inspiration that you’re after, you’ll do no better than hanging your hat with L.A.’s Rilo Kiley, two embarrassingly talented (ex-child star) singer-songwriters and the rhythm section that supports them…
Last year, this free weekly downtown series was one of those things I always talked about doing but never did–like going to the gym or paying my credit card bill on time. It just sounded so terrific, the perfect urban late afternoon: me, a beer, a breeze and some of…
Grammy-nominated local boys Bowling for Soup have managed to parlay what in other hands could’ve been the makings of a one-hit wonder–“Girl All the Bad Guys Want,” their jock-baiting 2002 hit–into an honest-to-goodness career making the sort of insanely tuneful pop-punk singles that sound great on Top 40 radio between…
