It’s a natural progression, really, one that makes perfect sense. Most cats who would be inclined to put together a 264-page history of how sneakers affected New York’s youth culture in the 1970s and ’80s probably would have arrived at that point by following the same path Bobbito Garcia did…
Over the years, we’ve wondered why some of the bigger rock shows don’t come to Dallas but do, on occasion, schedule a stop in Houston. Or near Houston, we should say, since the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion is in The Woodlands, a suburb about half an hour or so outside…
Calling punk an attitude has become something of an MTV-generation cliché. Usually it’s offered up as a post-mortem tribute to a musician’s rebelliousness and unvarnished risk-taking musical credibility: Johnny Cash, yo, that guy was punk. Bob Marley. Dee Dee Ramone (duh). But there’s more resonance, now, in punk as an…
Very rarely does a rock band release a “remix album,” and that’s fine by us. In most cases, producers just strip the most identifiable vocals from a song and plop them down over cookie-cutter club beats. So why bother? It makes more sense in the case of the Dismemberment Plan,…
Achtung, baby: I’m one of those soulless cranks who likes Liz Phair’s new record. A few weeks ago I argued elsewhere that the album’s four Matrix-produced songs “demonstrate how much room there is inside radio-pop sheen for actual emotional content”–particularly with regard to “the everyday compromises of single-momhood.” And I…
Erykah Badu’s latest, Worldwide Underground, is like a novella from a great writer–you’re reminded of the earlier stuff, you hear the continuation of old story lines and themes, but then you notice that it floats above a new tone; the voice rattles with a different urgency. The new record transcends…
The guys in Chicago’s Califone look at Americana from the inside out, taking stock of the form’s parts (rootsy acoustic strumming, wagon-wheel drumming, cigarette-smoke vocalizing) and seeing what’s not there (warped keyboard whine, laptop clicks, lyrics about “sugar hands” and “amputated years”). On Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, their latest, they fit all of…
“One speaker keeps going out on the stereo, but the music still sounds great,” sings Eric Hisaw on “Maybe the Devil,” the song that launches 2002’s Never Could Walk the Line with the primal musician myth of trading one’s soul to Satan for talent. Hisaw makes the reverse swap perhaps;…
It might be the deal to beat in 2003: two eccentric, slightly hair-raising singer-songwriters appearing together for the price of…well, two, I suppose, since neither is playing in the parking lot for free. Papa M should be worth the bucks, since with the recent dissolution of Zwan (in which he…
Back in the day, and we’re talking about maybe five or six years ago, the Good/Bad Art Collective could be counted on for at least one genius music moment every few months. Centro-matic’s Will Johnson performing in a bunny suit on a swing. Chomsky playing in a box. E.F.F. doing…
If Lisa Marie Presley had the last name of, say, Jones, would the Dallas Observer be speaking to the singer who put out the album To Whom It May Concern? Given the music on her now gold record, maybe, maybe not. Then again, Presley hardly needs to strive for any…
“Can we talk about something else?” It’s hard to tell whether Beulah front man Miles Kurosky is joking. After all, he’s only one question into an interview about, among other things, his band’s new album, Yoko, which he’s already confessed is his favorite of the four Beulah has released. Under…
Jack White sure does love Holly Golightly. But for most White Stripes fans, the song “Well It’s True That We Love One Another” was the first anyone had heard of her. Who was this tart little miss lobbing rose-scented rejoinders at Jack on the closing track of Elephant? Seriously. White…
Beatles parallels are a record reviewer’s best friend and worst habit. But it’s just too tempting when listening to the fascinating sprawl of OutKast’s double-length latest to consider it urban music’s heir to The White Album–and not merely because the Georgia duo of Big Boi and Andre 3000, who each…
Even those sweater-wearing, ballad-loving, lower-lip-quivering pretty boys in Travis know it to be true: “All I want to do is rock,” front man Fran Healy sang in an early single that didn’t really. Yet on new albums by hairy American Andrew W.K. and hairy Brits the Darkness–confirmed rockers with sweat…
Against the Whitneys and Britneys, the Brandys and Beyoncés, the Mariahs and Monicas, the Myas and Ashantis, Mary J. Blige is a champion, even if she’s not always recognized as such. While she has the pipes and the aura of a pop diva, Mary actually shares some of the deep…
There’s so much wrong with pop-soul slicksters Maroon 5’s Songs About Jane–which, after an inconspicuous release in June 2002, has been picking up steam recently among fans of John Mayer and Michelle Branch, both of whom have soundbitten the L.A. band–that it actually ends up kind of right. For starters,…
Usually when a thirtysomething Midwestern white guy comes face to face with his midlife crisis, it involves buying a little red Mazda and banging a secretary. That was hardly the path for Alan Sparhawk, a man who spent the better part of the past decade achieving near-icon status fronting the…
We might just be playing devil’s advocate, but for Blender magazine to name Insane Clown Posse the “worst band ever” kind of seems like a misfire. Of course, the music of Violent Jay and Shaggy 2 Dope is utterly useless, banal garbage. Of course, their ravenously adoring “Juggalo” fans are…
As much as we would like it to be, the North Texas New Music Festival will never be South by Southwest. But that’s OK, because its lower profile allows attendees to focus on what’s really important: the bands. Not free drinks or rumored special guests or industry shop talk or…
It’s a simple philosophy, one that Kenna Zemedkun offers up with little prompting. “It doesn’t matter what size the stage is. I give everything I’ve got. At the end of the day, you’ll either get it or you won’t. And the people that don’t get it, they weren’t supposed to…
“If anyone can come up with a name…” sputters Turbonegro bassist-mastermind Happy Tom, attempting–via cell phone from an Oslo taxicab, no less–to hang a handle on the Norwegian death-punk band’s upcoming excursion to the U.S. Bible Belt. Perhaps he’s trying to top last summer’s Res-Erection festival tour. “The Sex Pistols…
