Blue Man Group is the goof heard ’round the world. From such simple elements as whimsy, gobs of blue greasepaint and a cobbled-together assortment of drums and PVC pipe instruments has been launched a modern entertainment and marketing juggernaut of proportions as stunning as the dazzling shows they present. These…
Jeremy Enigk is much shorter than he sounds. On the string of records he made as the leader of the mythmaking (and now defunct) Seattle outfit Sunny Day Real Estate, the singer-guitarist used his distinctive singing voice–a high, reedy croon that can swivel from angelic to tortured on a single…
Mark Pearlman is either in a bad mood or caught in the throws of an identity crisis. He gets irked when he’s referred to as “Midwestern,” even though his Minneapolis home is planted firmly in the middle of the Midwest. He gets irritated when his band, the Jayhawks, is classified…
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a female-fronted three-piece from (where else?) Brooklyn, are being hyped as the latest saviors of raw fucking rock and roll, especially in Tony Blair’s kingdom, where mania over the garage-rock phenom runs high. They come to us as yet another American garage-rock tsunami in the wake of…
What I like about you, Harry Connick Jr.: Your soundtrack for When Harry Met Sally proves how ahead of the times you were in 1989; since then, lots of folks have adopted your do-a-bunch-of-songs-for-a-movie idea, including Badly Drawn Boy and Will Oldham, but not Simon and Garfunkel, who did it…
While young San Francisco married duo Mates of State’s second full-length, 2001’s Our Constant Concern (Polyvinyl), couldn’t accurately be called “dark,” their latest, September’s Team Boo, manages such a sunny smile it’s difficult to remember when the couple sounded distressed, even tense. How is it possible that a band so…
“Tiny Town,” from native Texan Tracy Byrd’s recent The Truth About Men, is the third-best tiny-town tune I’ve heard this year, behind “Nowhere,” the Bubba Sparxxx/Kiley Dean duet from Bubba’s Deliverance, and “Shh,” the unlisted closer from Atmosphere’s Seven’s Travels, in which MC Slug big-ups his home of Minneapolis, which…
Scruffy Manchurian Damon Gough, a.k.a. Badly Drawn Boy, is as lovable as he is erratic. His debut, The Hour of the Bewilderbeast, won him the British Mercury Prize (like a Grammy, but cool) and launched him stateside; its scattered, sometimes-orchestrated disco-funk-folk was like Cat Stevens singing on a Beck record,…
When a label signs one Dallas-area band, you can almost count on said label signing another one. It may take a few months, maybe a year, but it will happen. Oh, it will happen. For example: Wind-up: The House That Creed Built kicked off its love affair with Dallas by…
The five young men in the band had to deal with more bullshit than a cattle drive, but they never seemed to mind. All they cared about was the music, so if everyone wanted to talk about their clothes or their lifestyle, screw ’em, whatever. Let them have their fun…
What with presidential primary season almost upon us, and what promises (one hopes) to be a nail-biting, nasty, brutish and long race for the White House right around the corner, you may be starting to feel a little itch in your votin’ finger. But, alas, unless you maintain primary residence…
Many bands coveted Deftones’ support slot on this year’s Summer Sanitarium Tour, opening for Metallica, Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit. If singer Chino Moreno had his way, one of those other groups would have taken it. Deftones hesitantly took their spot on the bill, only after a 3-to-2 vote that…
So I’m slumming around the downtown Manhattan branch of Tower Records the other day, and I overhear this heated conversation happening the next aisle over. The super-hipster record-store clerk is shaking his head in disbelief as a schlumpy guy in his early 30s demands–demands–to know why he can’t find any…
Sheryl Crow left Las Vegas, but have the ’90s given us a better recidivist than her? The singer’s new, surprisingly great Greatest Hits is a virtual treatise on shining up shit–on turning the shallow and tawdry and questionably legal into little three-minute packets of abandon I’d pump my quarters into…
Like many bloated genres in these times, the singer-songwriter thing could use a good pruning, if not a merciless cull. After all, how many of these–from John Mayer to Kathleen Edwards to Frat Green–either aren’t genuine singers or can’t compose anything new or fresh or even maybe just inspired and…
It wasn’t all that surprising when Kittie’s head-banging debut, Spit, sold more than 600,000 copies. The quartet of metal-loving barely legals from London, Ontario, invaded America during our nü-metal honeymoon, brandishing enough slaying riffs and well-placed piercings to send Matt Pinfield straight to a cold shower. The unexpected twist was…
While last year’s self-titled debut from this Richmond, Virginia, quartet received its share of Björk comparisons, the group’s sophomore offering is likely to stand on its own merits rather than its trip-hop stylings and Maura Davis’ voice, which can be as earsplitting as that of Iceland’s pint-size princess. The Instinct,…
On one hand, Drums & Tuba are just your typical rock power trio, slogging it out 200 or so dates a year on the road. There’s guitar, drums and, well, on the other hand, a tuba. And no singer. Yet it’s still rock and roll, if also a whole lot…
In the beginning, there was rhythm. Hairy hominids banging bones. Then, pokey Neanderthals touched the monolith and discovered the handclap–they grunted with glee–then konked on a coconut, thumped on a stump. “Mmmm. Good…beat. Dance…to…it.” Eventually, the bones morphed in a flash into microphones. Early rappers rhymed about meat, arrows and–some…
It was one of my best stories at parties and such, a great icebreaker, sure to get a laugh. It was May 5, 2000, and I’d just seen Elliott Smith perform at Trees. He was touring behind his fifth and latest album, that year’s Figure 8, and the show couldn’t…
As it must, the Strokes’ second LP registers as something of a disappointment. After all, Room on Fire sounds like the Strokes’ debut–and once they remade the world in their own prickly, swivel-hipped image, nothing that sounds vaguely similar to 2001’s Is This It could ever best its trashy, spiteful,…
Global dance music has taken a hell of a beating over the past year or two. Once poised alongside rap to totally eclipse a rock-music field caught in the post-grunge doldrums, all sorts of white boys with guitars are starting to drown out the acid squeaks and once-novel DJ techniques…
