They might be terrible dressers, they might have chosen a dreadful band name, they might even be friends with those dorks the Get Up Kids, but don’t let anyone tell you that Lawrence, Kansas, popsters the Anniversary aren’t crafty: Designing a Nervous Breakdown, the band’s tuneful 2000 debut, packed just…
The title of Baboon’s new album, Something Good is Going to Happen to You, is truth in advertising, so long as you crack the shrinkwrap and give it a few listens or, better yet, a few hundred. It would apply just as easily to the band, had someone said it…
“What is hip?” Gov’t Mule front man Warren Haynes asks on The Deep End Volume 2, his band’s new album. For starters, it’s not something anyone who’ll stand onstage at the Gypsy Tea Room on Tuesday night knows much about, which is totally why you should go. These guys are…
It’s been a long time since Rasputina rocked and rolled–though not as long as its Victorian-era costumes might imply. But even after a lengthy hiatus, the all-female trio’s hard-corset blend of gothic imagery, black humor, stark strings and curiously modern industrial effects still seems fresh and charming. Never lapsing into…
Earlier this year, the folks at MTV’s Total Request Live had one for Corn Mo: Play us a Limp Bizkit tune on your accordion. Corn Mo had just regaled TRL’s viewing audience with his passionate rendition of Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine”–delivered without hesitation or irony. Earlier that…
For a rapper, Mike Skinner is awfully reticent. Coaxing an answer out of the English artist is like pulling teeth–which is ironic, given that his recent album is so lyrically thick that many critics seem to have overlooked the music entirely. Original Pirate Material, Skinner’s debut recording as the Streets,…
J.T. Van Zandt remembers just about every detail of his first visit to his father’s world. Townes and J.T.’s mother, Fran, had divorced before he was a year old, and until he was 9, J.T. only saw his father when Townes came to Houston to see his own mother. This…
Pardon us if we’re speaking out of turn, but this is something we’ve been thinking about for a while: Why isn’t there a local label with any sort of national presence? Some have the money, most have the talent. All are run by people who know what they’re doing. And…
Until 2000’s The Hour of the Bewilderbeast, Damon Gough could seep into the scenery, make his music without anyone making a fuss. Which is clearly the way he likes it: Since the beginning, he’s cultivated a sort of look-at-me anonymity, like a superhero who prefers his secret identity yet craves…
Decades after Warner Bros., and a handful of other labels, tried to make Doug Kershaw a star by selling his “crazy Cajun” (read: unreliable madman) shtick to the same folks who were buying Waylon and Willie and Kris and Johnny C., the 66-year-old “Louisiana Man” is still working a closed…
By now, the story of how the Foo Fighters’ fourth album happened–and almost didn’t–has been well-documented, to the point of becoming humdrum legend among the faithful legions waiting anxiously three years on. There was, in no particular order of importance, drummer Taylor Hawkins’ near-demise, after swallowing the dumb-ass’ cocktail of…
Last week Dallas was hit hard by commercial pop-punk bands committed to giving the form as complication-free a reading as possible; this week we’re getting a handful of outfits using major-label cash to make rock that defies the expectations that have come to dog aggressive music. Not that you’ll see…
Of course, we should only talk about the music. Of course, we should. Home is, by far, the best album the Dixie Chicks have recorded, more than worthy of a few hundred listens and, at the very least, a separate discussion. But they want it this way: The group didn’t…
The three founding members of Hi-Fi Drowning–singer-guitarist Eric Martin, bassist Jon Eggert and his brother Jeremy, who fills both the other guitar and keyboard roles–live together in a house in far east Dallas. The band, which also includes drummer Taylor Young (who lives elsewhere), even has a nickname for it:…
Word on the street has it that the blues never influenced Doug Martsch until a couple of years ago, when he heard an Alan Lomax recording of Fred Macdowell playing “Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind on Jesus).” Whereupon, the rumor goes, the erstwhile Built to Spill front man…
A few months ago, we got an e-mail from a publicist at Sub Pop Records, a guy we’ve known for three or four years. He was reminding us that one of the bands on the label was coming to town and were we going to cover it and, oh, by…
Over the course of its last two albums, Low has been investigating methods by which to expand its sound, a pretty natural progression for any group of artists working their way up to LP No. 6, and virtually imperative for a band with an infrastructure as skeletal as theirs. You…
It’s been some time now, and the Hives, the Vines and others of their ilk have to be growing stale in the ears of the powers-that-be at MTV2 by now. Something must fill that gap. Enter Hot Hot Heat (in current terms: a more optimistic Clinic, replete with keyboard-y backbone…
This six-week traveling package tour couldn’t have its heart in a more righteous place. Ten percent of the money made from ticket sales goes to benefit the National Hopeline Network, a Virginia-based suicide-prevention program that aims to give people in trouble easy access to instant telephone counseling, “regardless of where…
Somewhere Tony Wilson is laughing, and Ian Curtis is probably rolling in his grave. Or maybe every other band has always been compared to Joy Division and we just never noticed until sitting through 24 Hour Party People. Leading the pack is Interpol (the apple, for now, of the Big…
Sad dudes, sad tunes. Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys show up first, at Gypsy Tea Room on Thursday night, and it’s a good thing: The precise honky-tonk laments on their third album, Your Favorite Fool, are so genre-specific they don’t demand much unpacking to reveal their lovelorn frowns–all it…
Every last conceit that makes heavy metal both goofy and great is encapsulated on Nile’s fourth full-length, the colossal In Their Darkened Shrines. Sure, it may be hard for those who can’t recite Brendan Fraser’s lines in The Mummy from memory to suppress chuckles at these guys’ preoccupation with Egyptian…
