Read the other day that Macy Gray’s Id–the album, though what she sells is what she thinks–didn’t move because of its being released before the smoke cleared post-September 11; sorry, didn’t buy it (the excuse, not the disc, though come to think of it…). The product didn’t move because it…
Here’s where my anti-iTunes stance proves out, in the Concept Album about cubicle losers and middle-class yutzes and the forgotten schmoes out there for whom love’s still a grade-school daydream 20 years on and satisfaction means keeping the day job you hated in the first friggin’ place. All Fountains of…
Tricky’s ascension to worldwide critical acclaim and not-unimpressive commercial prosperity was one of the more unlikely success stories of the 1990s, since for all it shared with the down-tempo chill-out fluff it’s inspired, Tricky’s music was the singularly difficult and complex product of a singularly difficult and complex mind. Maxinquaye…
A double shot of creepy-ass California indie eccentricity awaits the bravely patient. Up first, fêted singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart, a scruffily handsome 22-year-old San Francisco Academy of Art dropout whose debut album, Oh Me Oh My…The Way the Day Goes By the Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the…
Against all odds, the Warped Tour isn’t the only chance you’ve got this week to catch overheated punk-inflected pop bands (or pop-inflected punk bands) sweating it out onstage for a few dollars and the opportunity to bleed American for 45 minutes or so. Brand New and Moneen hit The Door…
Used to be 33 bands (by my count, anyway, but I was told there would be little math in this course) would play over two, maybe three days; used to call ’em “festivals” back in my day, the late ’80s. Now it’s 25 minutes by one-and-done bands that sound gassed…
People ask me all the time, “Why do you listen to that Widespread Panic crap?” The worst part is that I usually have no intelligent response. I usually say, “Either you get it or you don’t get it, plain and simple,” even when I have three days to come up…
After a long couple of months’ worth of freedom fries, freedom toast and supremely disappointing freedom kissing, we quarrelsome Americans finally get an overdue helping of genuine, uncut Frenchitude, in the form of a visit by Paris-based sisters Hélène and Célia Faussart, the presumably peace-loving ladies of Les Nubians and…
“I paid for it already,” White Light Motorcade front man Harley Dinardo snaps. He’s fighting with a gas-station clerk about an ice cream sandwich. “I’m trying to tell her that I paid for it already,” he says. After he smooths things out he heads back outside to the van. “The…
It’s Friday night and New York City is gearing up for its 13th consecutive weekend of rain. Thirteen weekends, 13 rains: dull, bland, constant rain; drizzles thin as mist; warm sudden gales that strike and retreat like guerrilla warriors. More. But there’s no kidding around about this rain, not tonight:…
If I’d gotten that job as Sony Music Soundtrax pooh-bah like I should have, I’d have called this 14-song soundtrack to the second installment in what fun-loving humans can only hope will end up a many-part series Charlie’s Angles: You’re only likely to not find something you can dig if…
Smack in the middle of Prince Paul’s witty and acerbic hip-hop satire, Politics of the Business, DJ Premier of Gang Starr voices an ethic that expresses both the heart of Prince Paul’s critique of hip-hop and the promise of Gang Starr’s new joint, Ownerz. What Primo explains is that for…
In case just listening to the schizophrenic You Forgot It in People leaves you scratching your head, it comes equipped with an underlined thesis statement. Evidently the record is “designed to remind us that music still has room to be re-created.” Ambitious. “It flows like a compilation of sounds for…
Someone must’ve done the alt-rock fairy a favor: This summer brings us not only former Lemonhead-professional junkie Evan Dando’s unexpected return to record-making and show-playing, but also the long-awaited jump-start of ex-Weezer-Rentals dude Matt Sharp’s solo career. His new four-song Puckett’s Versus the Country Boy EP isn’t at all what…
Two options for a disorienting Saturday night this week: Stay home and watch NBC’s Critical Assembly, in which four college students build a nuclear bomb just “to prove how easily it can be done,” but then regret their hubris when terrorists steal the damn thing. (“Mayhem follows,” TV Guide assures.)…
“Never thought I’d still be doing this,” Charlie Gilder says, laughing a little. On July 9, it’ll be 20 years since Gilder and his partner, Steve Asbeck, opened the Twilite Room at 2111 Commerce St., sandwiched between Deep Ellum and downtown. The building is actually about 20 yards from where…
By now, it would seem, there is no story about Fleetwood Mac left to tell. No snort has gone undocumented, no betrayal unchecked, no argument unheard. They sold millions of albums to people who knew the soap opera and wanted the soundtrack; they sold tons of concert tickets to those…
At some point, Evan Dando disappeared. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it occurred; it was more of a fade than a moment of spontaneous disintegration. But by the second half of the ’90s–after a series of minor successes as the front man for Boston alt-rock darlings the Lemonheads, and…
Joe Budden’s self-titled debut comes to us courtesy of “Pump It Up,” a seemingly omnipresent club hit, on which producer Just Blaze turns a sample from Kool and the Gang’s “Soul Vibration” into a stop-start, high-energy rave-up. Not surprisingly, the underground success of “Pump It Up” and its lesser-known predecessor,…
Only the Clientele could write a song called “House on Fire” that evokes no urgency, heat or danger. It shuffles along at about the same unworried pace as the rest of the trio’s The Violet Hour–technically their full-length debut, since 2000’s Suburban Light was a collection of singles–as if a…
Little point to picking up the Hulk soundtrack, unless you feel like owning another Danny Elfman score for a comic-book film adaptation that sounds exactly like every other Danny Elfman score for a comic-book film adaptation. Tacked onto the end of the disc, however, is “Set Me Free,” the debut…
On his last two records, 2001’s Sweet Tea and now Blues Singer, Buddy Guy has been retrofitted in an attempt to find a new (read: younger) audience. This isn’t really a bad move. On Sweet Tea, Guy explains through his guitar that modern rock music could not exist without his…
