If it’s an election year, then it must be time for the new Ministry album. Word on the street is goateed psychotic Al Jourgensen is up for his two-year chip at the downtown El Paso NA meeting, and he’s ready to reinvent his particular church of the subgenius. Even estranged…
In a move that surely shocked about seven Dallas music fans, cover band The Upside Downers changed their name to The Shapes. The new moniker debuted at Bar of Soap on Saturday, and when I asked members of the packed crowd what the big deal was, they told me the…
The Darkness may have stolen the spotlight at South by Southwest 2003, but Petty Booka stole the hearts of those who saw them. Wearing cowboy hats and strumming ukuleles, this quirky Japanese duo played stirring covers of Patsy Cline, Madonna and the Ramones. What makes their music more than novelty,…
Rarely does a band’s name perfectly sum up what it does. But Casiotone for the Painfully Alone’s music is exactly as it sounds: songs about loneliness and heartbreak performed on Casiotone keyboards by Owen Ashworth, possibly the saddest man in the world. But these songs–with words such as “And the…
Don’t call it a comeback; they’ve been here for years. No, really: Even if they’ve spent most of this century making kids records, writing (occasionally Grammy-winning) TV theme songs and being the subject of entertaining documentaries, They Might Be Giants haven’t forgotten their first love: the kooky pop-rock with which…
By now, radio stations and jukeboxes have spun Jet’s infectious “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” into the ground. Apparently something on Jet’s first album, Get Born, appeals to everyone. (In one afternoon, I overheard a pack of 17-year-olds and then a couple of 40-somethings discussing the Gypsy Tea Room…
These high-octane, high-attitude garage rockers are like the version of the Hives no one’s heard of: They’ll blow up your skirt in concert expending the energy of 14 or 15 lesser bands, then tell you how lucky you were to see them and how courteous they were to be seen…
Dallas is a rock town. No place for a girl and her piano, really; I don’t care how many Norah Joneses grew up here. Fortunately, Lauren Fine hasn’t heard, or doesn’t care, and she makes the kind of modest, lovely singer-songwriter music that the city sorely lacks. The 11 songs…
I’ve seen weird instruments listed in CD liner notes before, but a dot matrix printer must be the weirdest yet. The rest of the Dallas duo’s musical arsenal is just as unconventional, but on Cabana EP+, the Casio keyboards and old-school video game systems transcend most gimmicks associated with “blip-hop.”…
In a culture bombarded by ever-shortening bits of information, Múm offers plenty to attract your overtaxed attention: They’re from Iceland! They record albums in remote lighthouses! Until recently they included a pair of twin sisters whose singing voices resemble those of 6-year-old tree nymphs! Yet put on one of Múm’s…
When I was a teenager, the Granada Theater was a nifty movie house that served booze and decent food. You could even smoke inside. The movies were usually second-run, but they were cheap, and the place got pretty full on Fridays. Still, I always thought the space was underutilized, underappreciated,…
Congratulations to Chris Bell, an accomplished Dallas sound engineer recently named president of the Recording Academy’s Texas Chapter. The Recording Academy, you’ll remember, is the group behind a little thing called the Grammys. Bell, who has spent the past four years at Luminous Sounds, has worked on releases from, among…
Ain’t talkin’ ’bout good: “Eruption” opens disc one of this alleged best-of two-fer, then slides into three new songs from the reunited Van Hagar, a trio of overwrought, oversung, under-thought tracks so terrible they wouldn’t even make the cut on a worst-of. “You Really Got Me” finally arrives six tracks…
The Cure’s new record is its first since bandleader Robert Smith disbanded the group following 2000’s underrated Bloodflowers, and it was produced by Ross Robinson, whose résumé includes work for Slipknot, Korn and Vanilla Ice. But worry not: The self-titled return sounds almost exactly like a Cure record should–almost, because…
So, yeah, Spider-Man is one of the more realistic comic-book heroes fighting crime today: He lives in New York, not Gotham City or Metropolis; he’s motivated by rage and guilt, not a heart of gold; he’s a nerd, not a stud. Plus, his superpowers derive from a bug bite. Still,…
The cover of this album features a dozen (generally repugnant) gentlemen clad in pink briefs and tank tops. Each shirt displays the band’s name: The Kickass. The album? Death Metal Is for Pussies. My thought: “Now I really hate The Darkness.” I couldn’t have been more wrong. This North Carolina…
The Polyphonic Spree’s first album, The Beginning Stages of …, was a demo recorded in a few days and eventually released by Hollywood Records. As an album, it’s slapdash and scattered, with a lot of instrumental throat-clearing that stretches into tedium. And as Tim DeLaughter’s be-robed gang rose to critical…
My first steps into the Cavern were met with a Dallas-loving sound check. The Happy Bullets practiced riffs from local pop-rock faves like The Deathray Davies and The Tah Dahs before opening, as if to claim music residency in the city. I wasn’t ready to buy that, because at previous…
D12 at the Gypsy Tea Room? What gives? You’d imagine that the MTV-ruling rap sextet would have no trouble filling up Nokia Live or Smirnoff, especially since they feature that white guy who’s named after candy-coated chocolates. Unfortunately, Eminem won’t join his Detroit posse in Dallas on Friday, which means…
Kudos to Diana Krall–or her manager, or booking agent, or publicist, or whoever–for taking this New York-based group out on the road this summer instead of one of the 657 young crooners currently vying for a bit of that filthy Next Norah Jones lucre. Ollabelle, who always refuses cash from…
Hagfish held weekly rock-and-roll revivals, packing young, mostly male fans into the Galaxy Club, the Orbit Room and Trees, inciting mosh pits close to the stage and middle fingers from the front to back at the bar. The crowds knew every word of their sexy and (kinda) sexist songs, sometimes…
I was 13 years old when I saw Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, so young that all I remember are the opening credits and Rosie Perez’s ferocious shadowboxing to a song unlike any I’d heard at that age–Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” a song that would, over the years,…
