The Aquarian Institute in Berkeley is located in a modest two-story home with a white picket fence. It is the place of business of one Allen David Young, Ph.D, a man who, among other things, is known from time to time to converse with souls who have passed away. This…
The D.O.C. had his comeback set up just right. Starting over with a new label (his own, Silverback Records) and a talented crew of local MCs (6Two, U.p.t.i.g.h.t., Cadillac Seville), he recorded a new album and titled it Deuce, because he considered it his real second album, his official follow-up…
You’re never free, not really, not if you are Chan Marshall, otherwise known as Cat Power. Not if you’re covered in the fragments of a shattered relationship; Marshall wants to be a “Good Woman,” so she leaves her good man, who just happens to be Eddie Vedder. Not if you’re…
If you haven’t figured it out by now–and how could you miss it, given the sudden ubiquity of The Band Warners Paid Twice to Release Once–Wilco’s best selling point is its front man’s nostalgia for an era when “pop” meant AM free-form, not FM formula; Jeff Tweedy thinks he’s still…
Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the first full-length from rapper 50 Cent, isn’t so much a debut as an entry wound. Having been shot nine times, 50 Cent is plenty familiar with the latter. But despite all the spent rounds, death and suffering that serve as this album’s very marrow,…
Plenty of post-emo hand-wringing in town this week, beginning Thursday night at Rubber Gloves in Denton with an appearance by Chicago brainiacs Milemarker, on tour in support of a recent Jade Tree EP, Satanic Versus. The band, led in part by bassist Al Burian, author of the terrific Burn Collector…
Bryce Avary twists in his seat after every question, staring down at the cell phone he’s cupping in his hands as though it will give him the answer if he watches it long enough. Can’t really blame him for hoping someone will give him the answers. He’s been trying to…
The mystery begins the first time you hear the flowing gospel of Washington Phillips, whose entire recorded output consists of 18 tracks recorded in Dallas from 1927-1929. His sacred porch songs, bathed in a celestial haze of notes from a strange instrument identified as a dolceola, sing out the existence…
We’re not big fans of Valentine’s Day. OK, so we despise it with all the hate we can churn out of our tiny black heart, which rests comfortably just above our tinier, blacker lungs. (In laymen’s terms, our lungs look like miniature boxing gloves. Like the kind you’d find on,…
If The Fine Art of Self Destruction sounds like the title of a Ryan Adams record, there’s a reason: He produced it. Jesse Malin used to front D-list glam-punks D Generation, but Fine Art is his solo bow as the kind of hard-living, hard-loving alt-country hunk Adams has reminded us…
It didn’t take me long to give into “The Game of Love,” the single from that newish Santana album that Michelle Branch sings–maybe four or five times on the radio, then one or two on the CD as I checked the liner notes to see if they actually gave a…
The four-band tag-team lineup is a full 360 degrees of the overtly fast and furious. This year Glassjaw occupies the headliner’s slot, and will be taking no shorts from frenetic show openers Hot Water Music. Each band represents opposite ends of the cacophony half-pipe, like water for chocolate or a…
Tweed’s debut, Jet Lag Heart, is an 11-song remedy made of mellow bellows and sad thoughts thick on the common themes of regret and hazy dreams. In other words: great make-out music. Or even better: beer-drinking music. Singer-guitarist John Garrett gets all “tied in a knot” because “it ain’t easy…
It doesn’t stretch the imagination much to use some pedal steel and a few maracas to evoke the landscape of the Southwest–rocky desert, border towns–but the remarkable thing about Calexico has always been the way Joey Burns and John Convertino tread beyond the clichés of their band’s country and mariachi…
Every year around this time, we start complaining about the fact that the annual South by Southwest is in Austin and why can’t it be in Dallas and we just want to drink a lot and sleep in our own bed. Blah blah blah. Gotten plenty of mileage out of…
Here’s the most significant way having a baby has changed Kasey Chambers’ life: “I used to, as soon as I walked off stage, I would go straight to the back room and have a cigarette. And soon as I got pregnant, I gave up smoking. And now, I walk straight…
Rock and roll can will a peculiar sort of transformation upon a musician. For former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, the transformations he’s undergone since starting this life in 1963 as John Maher have been subtle yet profound. A music obsessive who fronted several go-nowhere bands, Marr made the jump to…
The soundtrack to the new Laurence Fishburne motorcycle fiasco Biker Boyz skews toward those hip-hop loyalists enticed by big-screen Ruff Ryders iconography–typical Jadakiss bluster; a tasty Redman joint; Mowett & Loon’s awful, Toto-sampling “Tru Rider”–but it also takes a cue from Kid Rock (who turns up in the movie) in…
Certain creative outfits possess the unusual quality of developing personalities that shift and change as subtly yet as certainly as a human being’s. And as Massive Attack enters its second decade, it does so without founding members Mushroom (Andrew Vowles) and Daddy Gee (Grant Marshall, who is currently on sabbatical…
Lo-fi indie-pop gets a startling makeover in the able hands of Phil Elvrum, the young Washington state producer-musician who fronts the loose aggregate of crunchy creative types known as the Microphones. Over a series of albums and singles, Elvrum has methodically disassembled the idea of the shaggy-haired dude with a…
With last year’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Jeff Tweedy led Wilco into less-tone/more-drone terrain, determined, it seems, to record the weirdest folk songs of all time. Jim O’Rourke, on the other hand, has pared down his avant-eclectic sound in recent years, often opting for more traditional rock-guitar diatribes and sneering vocal…
Deep down, the lit majors don’t care as much about what he has to say as much as how he says it. So he’s got a novel to his name; big whoop. Ethan Hawke has two, and you don’t see anyone rushing to his defense every time his goatee grows…
