I have this theory that the reason so many foreign films capture the hearts of Americans who profess to hate “pap” like Stepmom is because foreign filmmakers don’t share their American counterparts’ fear of straight-up sentiment, so their films hedge far fewer bets and therefore connect more viscerally with viewers…
The music biz demands a lot from its ranks: Confuse fish with chicken for laughs! Put your hair in cornrows even though you’re a puffy white man! Adapt to changing styles and trends so 14-year-old girls with $4 allowances will legally download your album over three weeks! I’m not sure…
Bobgoblin was a concept band: four guys in dark flight suits assigned numbers and pseudonyms, calling themselves the “leaders of Black Market Party revolution rock” and singing about “Standing Up (To the Voice of America).” The shtick that this was not just a musical band but also a band of…
Juana Molina is an Argentinean singer/guitarist who also happens to be a well-known comic actor in her native country. When she plays live she allows her long brown hair to hang in her face while she picks simple figures on her guitar and overlays them with precise vocal lines; her…
Of all the “The” bands swearing devotion to the Sonics/Stones/Stooges holy trinity of garage rock, the Hives have always seemed to have the most fun. Unhindered by the Strokes’ penchant for rock-star cliché or the White Stripes’ Machiavellian creepiness, the Hives reveled in the simple pleasures of three chords, a…
If Alejandro Escovedo’s life has been an open book, then his music has provided the soundtrack–chapters of which recount his father’s moving north from Mexico and his ex-wife’s suicide in 1991 and his divorce from his second wife in 2001 and his being diagnosed with Hepatitis C last year. You…
“Their album sucks, but you gotta catch them in concert!” is the common defense of pet bands, and heck, I’ve said that about a few artists who didn’t have the money or time to get things right on records. Out of all the inconsistent bands I admire, though, Pleasure Club…
Shibboleth shouldn’t be in this column. Dallas’ nerd-jazz-rockers put on local shows pretty frequently, but theirs is the music people play pool to or sit in the corner with friends and chat over. It’s among the best (and certainly most unique) live background music you’ll find at a bar in…
The ambient music of one-man band the Album Leaf, aka Jimmy LaValle, has drawn comparisons to Brian Eno and other deep thinkers of contemporary electronic rock. But LaValle may be the most unpretentious record maker you’ll ever meet. He names Stevie Wonder, Billie Holiday, Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake as favorites…
The rock-and-roll adage is to burn out, not fade away. Braid did that, breaking up in August 1999 after playing 200 shows and touring for eight months the year before. There was no fading, either: Three post-breakup albums were released (a live one and the two volumes of Movie Music,…
In the recording studio, producer Daniel Lanois imbues material by his clients–U2, Bob Dylan and Peter Gabriel among them–with a warm, womblike glow that creates the illusion of intimacy out of a careful wrangling of modern technology. He does the same thing on his own solo albums: If last year’s…
Drag It Up is the Old 97’s sixth album and their first since 2001’s Satellite Rides. Since that album, the band has been dropped from its major label, Elektra, and for a while, its future was rumored to be in jeopardy while front man Rhett Miller started a family in…
“I wouldn’t consider us a throwback, but I also wouldn’t say we’re reinventing the wheel of rock and roll,” says Ronnie Vannucci, drummer for the Killers. “We’re taking the best parts of the music we were influenced by, putting them in our songs and making them our own.” The Killers…
In his column in last month’s Spin, Dave Eggers waxed hyperbolic about San Francisco harpist Joanna Newsom. She was haunting, sad, lovely, precious, dark, bizarre, brilliant. I happen to be a fan of Eggers–his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a masterpiece of a self-indulgent, hemorrhaging prose–so I…
Here’s an event to please the whole family: On Saturday, Coyote Ugly will host a fund-raiser for DISD schoolchildren called Christmas in July. Last time I went to Coyote Ugly–OK, the only time–a waitress served me a beer by holding it with her teeth and crawling across the bar on…
Isn’t anybody else tired of the longhaired bands from New York? So many greasy, leather-wearing, Iggy Pop-imitating sleaze-rockers call the Big Apple their home, but bands like that make it easy to forget that America’s boiling pot still has some treats in its stew. Trees stirs up a tasty reminder…
A few months ago, on a Saturday night, I judged a Battle of the Bands, where the best rock groups from local private high schools competed for fame, glory and $500. “Shit, man,” scoffed John Dufilho, riding next to me in the passenger seat. “If I’d known about the 500…
Davíd Garza may not enjoy talking about his past, but talking isn’t how musicians communicate best anyway. Maybe that’s why the Mexican-American singer-songwriter, a 33-year-old Irving native who has already released a dozen albums, is augmenting that vast catalog with a four-CD, one-DVD box set. Appropriately titled A Strange Mess…
“Come awwwwwn!” the girl on the Harley yelled, lifting up her top in the scorching sun. She was growing impatient; it’s not the kinda place you wanna burn. “You gotta put your shirt down,” I told her nervously, proving with one prudish sentence that I know nothing about good photography…
Five records into a solo career, and at last Graham Coxon’s willing to admit, or remember, he used to be in Blur–y’know, a pop band. Up till now his output’s been so impenetrably artsy-fartsy, full of slack-ass no-fi indie rawk and mopey country-blues, or what the kids call “unlistenable.” I’d…
Last year in these pages I called New York-based roots-rocker Jesse Malin a “solipsistic fuckface.” (Actually, I only said he could come off like one, and only a lot of the time at that.) In the very unlikely event that Malin read those words on a swing through town (or…
It’s hard to talk about Ozomatli without coming off like some chai-drinking, dashiki-wearing boho hipster. To wit: Street Signs’ socially conscious, knock-you-on-your-ass party grooves are a blend of hip-hop, funk, Latin and Middle Eastern flavors that compel earnest white people like myself to use words such as “global block party.”…
