It’s shaping up to be a spectacular year for perfectly formed lifestyle rock. The Strokes’ record is still happening, the Hives are making the Strokes look lame, Phantom Planet are hanging out with (or being) movie stars, the White Stripes are doing the same. And now cute Chicago dorks OK…
The Dishes serve up the kind of snotty, snarly, stop-start garage punk that’s enjoyed a minor vogue of late, thanks to successive Next Big Things the Strokes, the Hives, the Vines (see above) and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Indeed, the dirt-rock cognoscenti will no doubt cleave to this female-fronted Chicago…
What a bunch of brats. The new-school art-punks on this traveling package deal’ll spit in your eyes as soon as they’ll cater to your taste for provocation–too much school, too much underground notoriety and too many inside jokes have made these kids prickly pears at early ages, but there’s plenty…
The four members of Arlo are the kind of back-porch rockers who speed through a 30-minute set at your local club, so it makes sense that the group is named for its Tuesday-night soundman back in L.A. The group’s second disc, Stab the Unstoppable Hero, whittles Weezer pop out of…
Here’s something we never thought we’d say: We’ve heard the new Dixie Chicks album, and it’s good. Maybe great. Not sure, since we only heard it once, not near enough times to load it onto our mental six-CD changer. (Won’t pin down the means or location, because Sony seems fairly…
But six years ago John Frusciante was missing in action–not so much missing, actually, as lost, holed up in the Château Marmont on Sunset Boulevard with a guitar in one hand and a syringe in the other (actually, a syringe in the arm, leg, wherever he could tap a vein)…
Angry as it might make Aaron Carter and Stephen Barry, it makes more sense to view their group Cirrus as a cyborg than as a production duo. After all, alongside Moonshine label head Steven Levy, the pair have labored long and hard to create the Six Million Dollar Sound within…
On the front of At Sixes and Sevens, Jason Loewenstein’s name appears scrawled in a feverishly etched, scratched-over-for-emphasis font very similar to the one Pavement used to grace the cover of its celebrated 1992 album Slanted and Enchanted. Which is worth mentioning because Loewenstein is a former member of Sebadoh,…
The Burnt Hickory Bunch was on its way to Virginia to play in Ralph Stanley’s annual bluegrass festival, working on some new covers of mountain tunes, songs the lead singer had sung with her family forever ago in the Kentucky holler where she was raised. That singer, country star Patty…
Long before the uprising of 2002, during which Shiner bravely shrugged off the approach that had earned it hot-topic status nationally among power-pop teens, the Kansas-based band made an equally bold decision. Back in 1997, the band attracted a thin yet rabid following with Splay and Lula Divinia, two teeth-jarring,…
Poor, poor Britney Spears. With a third album only as deep as its Neptunes-produced hits, a messy breakup with Justin Timberlake and a food-poisoning case at her new NYC restaurant on her hands, this partially deposed pop princess must be longing for the good old days of 2000, when she…
A natural-born romantic, Ben Kweller’s new album, Sha Sha, bubbles over with the solfège of love–the bop-bops, the do-do, do-dos and the ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bas that give voice to the heart’s joy and yearning. From piano ballads to acoustic pop to raved-up rockers, there’s a spirited innocence on his album too often…
This Jeep-sponsored traveling all-day festival is billing itself as a “musical celebration of the outside active lifestyle,” but that’s nonsense–the only reason you should feel at all compelled to go is to check out what reasonably talented people can do with expensive recording equipment inside darkened rooms that cost a…
Lots of complicated women’s hair in Dallas this week–Britney Spears, Sheryl Crow, Kittie–but this is the real mother lode: Alaskan airhead Jewel, who sports a long blond mane on the cover of This Way, and Norwegian Olsen Twins look-alikes M2M, whose highlights probably cost more than their airfare. Jewel’s smart…
The Legendary Fritz and Headkrack tell completely different stories, with the same characters and a few similar plot points: Both believe they’re coming out ahead in a feud that’s been playing out (mainly) on Knowledge Dropped, Lessons Taught–Eddie D’s Saturday-evening hip-hop show on KNON-FM (89.3)–over the past few months. Both…
After putting one over on the public, by which I mean the fanatical hundreds who keep up with Damon Albarn’s digital-circle jerks, the Blur front man, Dan Nakamura, Jaime Hewlett and everyone else collecting royalties three albums in for one album’s worth of real, ahem, work return with yet another…
The belatedly released recording of the nine songs laid down at the band’s first studio session, Pixies reveals that as early as ’87, the Pixies had already come up with some of their best tunes. Pixies fans (and if you aren’t one, say a novena and run to the record…
Oasis still rakes in the pounds and can sell out a Scottish sheep pasture before tea, but American kids would rather crank Hoobastank than that whiny British band their older brother used to listen to. Too bad, because Heathen Chemistry is a ripping album–reminiscent of Definitely Maybe and (What’s the…
John Congleton and Matt Armstrong, otherwise known as one half of the pAper chAse, sit in a tiny, cluttered recording studio, otherwise known as one of the rooms in Congleton’s house in a quiet neighborhood in northeast Dallas. The spoils of Congleton’s successful eBay bids are thumbtacked to most of…
He may be a bald, vegan, gospel-loving peacenik, but ask him the wrong question and Moby turns into one combative little dude. Witness: Me: So, new record, new songs, new live show. What can we expect this time out? Moby: Well, when I make the records it’s just me in…
The clever video for “New Slang”–the first single off the Shins’ full-length debut, Oh, Inverted World–has the band’s four members posing in careful re-creations of various classic indie album covers: the Replacements’ Let It Be, Cat Power’s Moon Pix, Slint’s Spiderland and Hüsker Dü’s New Day Rising and Zen Arcade…
A couple of the smartest tunes on Bratmobile’s third full-length, Girls Get Busy, lambaste George Dubya’s war on terrorism and his campaign to sway the public. On “Shop for America,” singer Allison Wolfe proffers the peppy ironic anthem “Kids in America shop for America,” while on “United We Don’t” she…
