If your girlfriend thinks Iron & Wine’s Our Endless Numbered Days makes you a bit too sensitive, try handing her a copy of Woman King. Sam Beam’s latest EP doesn’t transform his softly sung folk into power rockers, but Beam and friends expand their minimal approach with a packed studio’s…
The fifth album by Australian indie-pop wunderkind Ben Lee sports the crappiest title since, oh, Operation: Mindcrime. But give the guy a break: Last year he broke up with longtime girlfriend Claire Danes, then got to watch her fall in love with Billy Crudup, a handsome older man who could…
When was it–the day before yesterday?–when Mogwai was the hottest new thing? They were young Scots with slow-slow-LOUD panache, forging a new instrumental-rock gateway to the 21st century. So maybe we’re a bit complacent after the inevitable midcareer slump (’03’s Happy Songs for Happy People). But slumps are relative, and…
The credits suggest this is some long-lost artifact from Deep Ellum circa the mid-1990s: Clay Pendergrass (Dah-veed, Vibrolux), brother Trey (Vibrolux), Chris Claridy (Fever in the Funkhouse, Jack Ingram), Reed Easterwood (Junky Southern, Meredith Miller Band), Paul Williams (Tablet) and Jack O’Neill (the “Jacko” half of Jackopierce). The music, likewise,…
Nope is like the love child of The Replacements, the Plimsoles, the Rave-Ups, Furniture and Lindsay Buckingham. Toss in that their next album is being produced by Richard Lloyd (of Television and Rocket From the Tombs fame), and their sound is all the more attractive. Cousins Herman Suede and Christopher…
In case you didn’t know, roller derby is back. All-girl teams have started popping up around the D-FW area (see City on page 16), and last Sunday, four groups from the Austin-based Texas Rollergirls took the rink to show the newbies how it’s done. These wise ones came with kneepads…
“Don’t give up on me,” sings Bettie Serveert’s Carol van Dyk on the first song of Attagirl, the Holland band’s latest release. The vague lyrics may be about a relationship, but they also apply to Bettie Serveert, which had a few hits on college radio with the 1992 album Palomine…
What Missy Elliott and Timbaland are to future-shock hip-hop, these two are to neo-soul R&B right now: populists whose thirst for formal innovation never threatens a deep-seated desire to rock the radio. Though The Diary of Alicia Keys includes a few too many pages for me to make it all…
Like Lyle Lovett with a bad hangover, Fred Eaglesmith is a storyteller who has earned his keep. After his father lost the family farm, Eaglesmith hopped trains and gathered subject matter. Cowboy Junkies, Chris Knight and Dar Williams are some of the folks who have covered his songs. Releasing rough…
“You’ve got to keep those roots and branches growing and pray they’ll always be,” sings Tim O’Brien on Two Journeys, the 2001 album on which he celebrates his Irish heritage. And few if any contemporary musical artists have so beautifully balanced the disparate poles inherent in the notion of neo-traditional…
Nobody in Dallas had heard of Stuart Sikes. It was 2002, and the unemployed recording engineer walked into Bass Propulsion Laboratories and introduced himself. “Someone told me I should come by here,” he said vaguely. The owners, Todd and Toby Pipes, gave him a nod and the standard spiel. The…
My bedroom floor is a mess. I lovingly think of it as a multipurpose tool: a dirty-clothes hamper, a bookshelf, a CD case, a file cabinet and even a tool rack. But in spite of the land mines between my bed and my door, a good six or seven square…
“Groove” is somewhat of a red flag when it is mentioned w/r/t rock-and-roll bands. I mean, it used to be OK (see: Stones, etc.), but now it stinks of patchouli and only conjures images of smelly dudes doing something that approaches, but never quite reaches, dancing. (Jam bands have ruined…
Guitar legend Pat Metheny has done nothing more than expand his horizons for nearly 30 years. Initially a fusion player lost in the ’70s torrent of jazz-lite, Metheny always had the chops but seemed to stay too firmly in check to rank with the greats. That all ended with 1980’s…
A while ago, my enchantment with the Austin blues-rock scene wore off. After popping in Elizabeth McQueen’s disc, my first thought was: “Oh, shit, not another one.” And yet, Austin singer-songwriter McQueen has a cool idea brewin’ here. On her latest album, she and her boys cover classic pub-rock tracks…
On their first album together in almost a decade, the three original Geto Boys promise, in typically pugnacious fashion, to “send the whole world a fuck-you note.” The question is whether the world they’ve rejoined gives a fuck itself. It makes sense for Houston’s most hard-core rappers to rejoin forces–would…
Aesop Rock is the Jackson Pollock of hip-hop, spewing abstract syllables and phrases like color on a canvas. His style is overwhelming, with swirls of obscure references and interior rhymes that wash over you far faster than you can process them. So The Living Human Curiosity Sideshow, the comprehensive lyric…
Six of the eight tracks here are “originals,” which means they only sound like AC/DC tunes; the other two, “Money Honey” and “Back in Black,” were torn directly from the sacred text. On the one hand you have to admire the moxie of five guys, including front man Darren Caperna…
What do you get when you combine the loose instrumentals of Tortoise with the discordant guitars of Fugazi? Ideally, a band that sounds better than Tank Tank. While perfectly listenable, the Denton quartet fills its debut EP with 18 minutes of random guitar riffs chained together with barely a common…
Cavedweller is the brother of Denton art-rocker Fishboy. But musically Cavedweller is the Sentridoh to Fishboy’s Folk Implosion, the introspective four-tracker to the symphonic popper. Cavedweller even sounds like Lou Barlow, with a deep voice and slow, spoken delivery. Sugary Glue crams 21 tracks into 37 minutes, and it would…
At last month’s Eric Johnson show, the jaw-dropping started about an hour earlier than expected as Willy Porter began his amazing opening set. While politely keeping himself and his acoustic guitar at his appointed end of the stage, Porter equally mesmerized and awed the crowd with his deft finger-picking–and these…
Higher-pitched and more deafening than an army of small poodles, the quintet known as the Blood Brothers fires off shrapnel-like noise that singes the ears. Their passionate, demented, ranting hardcore is surely not for average folk, though the band’s latest record, Crimes, is much more palatable than past efforts that…
