These New York-based indie-rockers (recently relocated from Chicago, where they recorded both their albums at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio complex) figure there’s no reason you can’t work up a dense lather of electric-guitar distortion in one song and reduce another to a few plucked notes beneath a pretty harmony-vocal…
I discovered Toni Price as a junior at the University of Texas, still sputtering from a breakup that left me cradling wet tissue on the couch and canceling plans so I could stare at the phone, cruelly silent. I filled those lonely–nay, pathetic–hours with Price’s bluesy minor-masterpiece Hey, a 13-song…
A quick survey of the aftermath of a Little Grizzly show. Singer/ guitarist George Neal is hunched at center stage, face red, veins still throbbing in his forehead from screaming. His knuckles are white from beating his chest in time to the bass drum. Bassist Jacob Barnhart is lying on…
“Do I need earplugs?” my friend asked, half-joking. I was taking him to his first Riverboat Gamblers show. I wondered: If I told him he needed a hard hat, would he back out? That night the Gamblers played to a packed room at the Cavern. Outside, the air was chilly,…
A snapshot of the artist as a family man: Salim Nourallah, 35 years old, Coke-bottle glasses on a handsome face. A Beatles pin on the lapel of his Western-cut shirt. Scruffy hair, casually unshaven. He speaks passionately about his new role as a father, about three–three!–new recordings coming out in…
Like the Strokes and the Rapture before them, these well-dressed Scots make an effortlessly stylish sound. On their buzzed-about debut they underpin scratchy guitar fuzz with insistent disco beats and body-rocking bass lines, while singer Alex Kapranos oozes the sophisticated, world-weary charm of a young man who’s been to too…
Patty Griffin hasn’t wasted her second chance in the record industry. After a four-year drought caused by label woes, the Austin songwriter has since banged out two albums and a live disc in two years, and she has abandoned her attempts at Alanis-rock that weighed down her old work. Not…
Maybe you discovered the gifted North Carolina vocalist Anthony Hamilton the same way I did, stumbling across his recent appearance on Dave Chappelle’s Comedy Central joint a couple of weeks back. Or maybe you heard his guest spot on the Nappy Roots’ last album. Regardless: If you’re into organic r’n’b…
Who knew Gavin Rossdale inspired such animosity within the punk community? Sure, Bush’s flashy grunge fluff refigured Kurt Cobain’s hard-won angst into product for junior high mall stalkers, and, yeah, getting militant noisenik Steve Albini to produce 1996’s Razorblade Suitcase was kind of a coup. But 26 tracks dedicated to…
In rock and roll, it is usually the rule that the young will eat the old. What happens, then, when the old guys continue to outclass their disciples? That’s the case with indomitable noise veterans like Mission of Burma, Wire and the headliners on Friday evening at Trees, The Fall…
You know how in TV shows about high school, like Saved by the Bell or Beverly Hills, 90210, the students never seemed to get older? Instead they just cycled through the same conflicts and issues with no attention paid to the way time seems to fly during those years. How,…
When I caught up with Ben Kweller a couple of years ago, shortly after the release of his first solo album, Sha Sha, he talked about how great it was to make music without the burden of the record-biz machinations that practically defined the first phase of his music career…
Under most circumstances, the notion of six boxed sets–for a grand total of 36 discs, 245 tracks and a shade under 23 hours of music–dedicated to one band would seem a tad excessive, no? But then again, we’re talking about Depeche Mode. Few groups have been as worshiped as this…
Of all the memories I have from the Dallas Observer Music Awards (that would not include anything after, say, 1 a.m.), this may be my favorite: Myrtle Dupree accepting the Jazz award for her late husband, Al Dupree. I didn’t know Al, but like most Dallas music lovers, I knew…
Yes, they’re happy. Songs like “The World Is a Magical Place” and “The Day After Albert Changed the World” are as whimsical and ecstatic as anything that ever twinkled Snoopy’s toes. Their dippy Day-Glo album art would make Austin Powers blush. But that doesn’t mean Dallas’ Happy Bullets don’t dabble…
Don’t blame Chris Vrenna for trying. Other former members of Nine Inch Nails have escaped Trent’s inertia, but while they’ve found relative obscurity or mediocrity (see Guns N’ Roses and Filter), Vrenna’s solo work as Tweaker seems to strive for real, rarefied electronic artistry. 2001’s The Attraction to All Things…
Following Prince’s show-stealing performance at the Grammys, some who remembered his fabled past wondered whether he could heal the fractured music scene with another shower of Purple Rain. Despite the hopeful signs–from his return to a major label to the dial-flipping montage of old singles that closes the title track–this…
More than a dozen local musicians will join forces Saturday to create a live score to the 1923 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But it’s not a shared love of silent films or Lon Chaney, the “Man of a Thousand Faces,” that unites the keyboard-and-turntable-toting members of Mission Giant,…
Long Island native Mindy Smith has done time as a cog in the Nashville machine, but her debut, One Moment More, doesn’t sound much like country music, despite its liberal use of back-porch acoustic guitar and weepy-eyed lap steel. Instead, Smith’s a member of the widening field of singer/songwriters who’ve…
Margerine Eclipse, the latest from English-French groove outfit Stereolab, offers the same pleasure as a handful of the band’s most recent albums: meticulously manicured sounds carefully assembled into songs that exist principally to showcase their constituent parts. The band’s members don’t seem entirely comfortable with this fact, since they’re always…
It was one of those years. Three beloved major-label acts dominating nearly every major category, with little but their hometown in common. One a sweet, unassuming Christian family making music beyond their years. One a crew of aging but still-scorching rockers giddily throwing up the devil horns. One a chorus…
Black Rebel Motorcyle Club has a bad reputation. Journalists who regularly stare down legends are rumored to have run from interviews quaking from exasperation and shaking their microcassette recorders in knotted fists. Before a meeting with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (or BRMC), reporters trade tactics: try flirting; try alcohol; talk…
