If Pearl Jam once came across as a group of populist party-poopers who helped put a bar code on teen-age angst, these born-again progressives now seem bent on forsaking their riches for righteousness. With a new album of wild-eyed, off-the-cuff rockers with little commercial potential (including a temperamental attack on…
It’s been a good year for gently genre-jamming albums by rangy roots-music ladies–recent discs from Allison Moorer, Patty Griffin, Norah Jones and Caitlin Cary have shown how possible it is to dress up country intimacy in pop pleasure without sounding like Shania or Faith or LeAnn. Even Sheryl Crow’s C’mon,…
Chris Robinson’s learned a lot since his days fronting America’s best jam-band-that-actually-wrote-great-songs, the Black Crowes: “Your California traffic,” he observes in “Sunday Sound,” a tune on New Earth Mud, his new solo joint, “I said, well, it just ain’t no fun.” And from “Katie Dear”: “Tuesday morning, hear the traffic…
Like a two-headed Hydra made of spare Ramones and Cramps parts left over in the lab, the Groovie Ghoulies decree that every day is Halloween and make every stage their own personal (albeit cheerful) abattoir. Spawned on the shadowy streets of Sacramento, the threesome is celebrating a new album on…
I don’t really put much stock in the concept of the guilty pleasure, but if you’re gonna feel guilty about liking something, shouldn’t it be really pleasurable? That’s the question Diana Krall’s new Verve disc, Live in Paris, keeps asking me: The Canadian singer-pianist’s playing is certainly fine, and her…
Lots of revised-history indie rock in town this week. Matt Pond PA, a sextet from Pennsylvania built around a dude named Matt Pond, wonders what the fussy English folk songs of Nick Drake and John Martyn would sound like if written and played by a sextet from Pennsylvania; the answer,…
Everybody knows that Shania Twain and Mutt Lange got married forever ago (did you see the picture? Mutt looks like Patrick Swayze with Melissa Manchester’s perm, so it’s no wonder Behind the Music keeps using that one photo), but did you know that they freaking live in Switzerland!? I fully…
Burnout rears its disillusioned head in all sorts of music scenes, but rarely does anyone figure they can rock a party with it. So this puts Jon Nowell and Daniel Ormondroyd of FC Kahuna at an advantage. They may not be able to place themselves at the forefront of a…
Week in, week out, we talk about what we think is right and wrong with local music, what needs to happen, what’s happening too often. That kind of thing. This week, we thought it would be a good idea to give someone else a chance to speak, especially in light…
When Brent Best laughs, it sounds like the slide racking on a shotgun. Sounds that way when he coughs, too. Sometimes when he sings. Depends. It’s a little worse than usual right now; he and his band, Slobberbone, were on the road in Europe for a few weeks and have…
Wondering what Beck’s gonna sound like with Oklahoma psych-pop nuts the Flaming Lips as his backing band? This 20-year-old Norwegian kid’s already figured it out: On Faces Down, his very nifty debut album, Sondre Lerche juices the serpentine space-folk of Mutations and Sea Change with the candy-colored instrumental flourishes the…
Clem Snide reached new heights with last year’s The Ghost of Fashion, which contained, among other highlights, an elegant tale of a suburban first love (“Joan Jett of Arc”) and an epic meditation on Corey Feldman’s collapse (“The Junky Jews”). Now that Snide–with its melancholic disposition and the lead singer…
It’s the unimaginable, the fucking unfathomable–X, reunited ’cause it feels so good, playing live after on-and-off years of playing dead, or at least going solo (or fixing amps for the Lawd, in the case of one William Zoom). It happens every so often, when John Doe and Exene Cervenka and…
If it’s a surprise that Beck follows his least necessary album (1999’s Midnite Vultures, where he tried so hard to be Prince he seemed on the verge of ditching his name in favor of a symbol) with his most essential disc (September’s Sea Change), it shouldn’t be. After all, that’s…
Every time I accidentally catch the twin brothers who front Good Charlotte hosting MTV2’s All Things Rock (which is never more than twice a week, promise) I say a little prayer that when I was 14, Green Day’s Kerplunk represented state-of-the-art pop-punk instead of the defanged mall-rock that currently fills…
Though they’ve spent the past year playing relatively big-ass rooms like the one they’ll play here Saturday night, don’t the Strokes seem like a smaller, cooler rock band today than the one they were last fall? Minus the all-Strokes-all-the-time media coverage that met its release, Is This It, the group’s…
Thursday night’s the night for rounded-edge hip-hop that soothes as much as it moves. When Atlanta-based headliner India.Arie appeared last year with Acoustic Soul (following several years of post-Lilith Fair wandering) it seemed the neo-soul movement had gone and produced its very own Phoebe Snow, a reanimation not exactly on…
Is David Bazan–ringleader of Pedro the Lion, this show’s headliner–a masochist or just a blind supporter of new talent? We present the evidence. Exhibit A: Seldom. The three-piece from Seattle, home of Pedro and former home of Scientific, spent the spring opening up for and serving as the backup band…
For all the problems the mainstreaming of emo has created–the validation of high school whining as high art, say, or the Get Up Kids’ and the Promise Ring’s hiring big-name producers to conceal a lack of actual songs, or a dwindling supply of horn-rimmed glasses and thrift-store T-shirts–what’s cool about…
Beyoncé and her bootylicious sistren might claim survivor status, but time will tell. Twenty years down the line, when Ms. Knowles is Aimee Mann’s age, will she still be bellowing out post-feminist female-empowerment anthems? Will she even have a career in show business? The odds are against it. Mann, on…
There’s nothing wrong with self-consciously lightweight pop records that seem to exist solely to spark a smile or a warm flutter in the abdomen–ever heard the Association’s “Never My Love” on a rainy Sunday afternoon and wished it would go on forever? On Guestroom the self-consciously lightweight New York City…
Ladytron makes music simultaneously from decades past and decades yet to come. Their layered beats and hovercraft grooves suggest the morning radio of an anonymous metropolis circa 2804 A.D. or the most forward-looking synth-pop of 1982. Which brings us to some place in the middle of that continuum: The group’s…
