Were you drawn to Cornershop’s left-field 1997 hit “Brimful of Asha” because it sounded like nothing in your record collection or because it sounded like everything in your record collection condensed down to five and a half minutes? That’s the question these polyglot London-based zanies have made a career out…
Buncha benefits happening around D-D-FW this week and next. First up is a shindig for the Denton Humane Society at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios on April 27, featuring performances by Will Johnson and Scott Danbom of Centro-matic, The Baptist Generals, Failure Plus and Southpaw Preachers, with all proceeds going to…
If hip-hop is indeed “the proverbial sad clown of music,” as New York rapper J-Live proclaimed on 1999’s unreleased and unofficial anthem, “The Best Part,” then J-Live himself is quite possibly the art form’s Emmett Kelly. Despite personal and professional heartache, he’s managed to maintain his optimism and love for…
As a gesture of rebellion, the photo-shoot middle finger is sooo 20th century; at this point, an artist would be served just as well by donning a raccoon coat and strumming a ukulele. When even MTV’s Carson Daly, perhaps the least threatening celebrity younger than Ed McMahon, assumes the position…
Fans of retro-minded indie pop that tries as hard as it can to push past its low-budget boundaries might want to get their paisley shirts dry-cleaned today, as a quartet of well-regarded touring bands hits Dallas this weekend for two shows that should offer plenty in the way of reconstructed…
The lot at the corner of Fry and Oak streets in Denton, next door to Voertman’s bookstore and across from the Cork Screw, still sits empty. There are a few trees and bushes, freckles of weeds on the packed dirt and trash, beer bottles and cans, fliers for shows and…
“Every time, I get nervous,” says rapper Gift of Gab at soundcheck for a February performance at L.A.’s Wiltern Theatre. “Like, two minutes before I go on. Every time.” Across the stage, DJ/producer Chief Xcel fiddles with the knobs and needles on his turntables. “Can you put my MPC at…
When Hunter Brown was a kid back in Georgia, he used to listen to records in his room and try to play along on the guitar. It’s a necessary rite of passage for all players–male or female, genre irrelevant–but where other kids his age might have been working out to…
In 1998, around the time Painted From Memory–his team-up with Burt Bacharach–hit stores, Elvis Costello gave up on the idea of playing rock and roll, or so he said. But he didn’t really need to put it in words: Costello had already spent much of the 1990s taking sidesteps, sparring…
There’s no escape from Tenacious D: Jack Black and Kyle Gass are in Foo Fighters videos, alone and together in various films (Shallow Hal, Cradle Will Rock and Saving Silverman, to name a few), popping up in the middle of a Mr. Show rerun on HBO or blowing the regulars…
To get the most inevitable, awkward facts out of the way, Joe Preston used to be in Earth, he used to be in the Melvins, he used to be in Men’s Recovery Project and he used to be in The Need. Now, there’s something called Thrones. From Olympia, Washington, Thrones’…
You can’t buy the kind of publicity Wilco received last year, when Reprise declined to release the newly completed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (see “Sunken Treasure,” September 20, 2001). Blocked from direct access to the mass market, Jeff Tweedy and company schlepped the whole album over to Wilco’s Web site (www.wilcoworld.net),…
The “official” record–Stereo, credited to Paul Westerberg, remember him?–is sloppy in an “artful” way, meaning songs abruptly end when the tape runs out while others collapse when the guy singing them peters out; they’re demos, or sound like them, assembled from two years’ worth of basement tapes, literally. The “unofficial”…
The man on the phone, M. Sayyid of Antipop Consortium, is furious. A minute into the conversation, he’s spitting out words for distance and accuracy; his voice is one part disbelief, two parts disgust, with a twist of disappointment. He’s tired of thinking about when DMX left the group awhile…
There’s a fine line between being an artist and a professional personality, and when you add the hip-hop concept of personality to the mix, things can get weird. An unmistakable alpha girl, Princess Superstar is all-American in a pretty wonderful way: bleached blond, entrepreneurial, earnest and calculatedly trashy. She’s gimmicky…
The four young dudes in Explosions in the Sky are certifiable film freaks, and it shows through in their music, which is full of invisible plotlines and peppered with imagery. In fact, for the Austin instrumentalists, songwriting is something like amateur screenwriting: Come up with a couple of images that…
There’s nothing more unfortunate than seeing cool lady musicians struggle with obscurity (see: Kathy McCarty, Lucinda Williams), and nothing more inspiring than watching them relish it. Holly Golightly’s probably the greatest example we have of the latter category. Enigmatic, reclusive and the subject of many a rock legend–it’s rumored that…
It’s an odd thing when songwriters become cover artists; it stops being about what they’re saying and instead becomes an exercise in how they’re saying it, which is usually far less interesting an exercise. When a writer becomes an interpreter, and nothing more, it almost feels incidental–as though he or…
As computer-based music composers learn the ins and outs of their instrument, one startling reality shines above all others: Anything is possible. No sound is forbidden or unattainable (a crow’s-caw rhythm?), no orchestration too cost-prohibitive (a 275-violin synthetic string section?), no keyboard configuration unattainable (a 17-note chord?). With so much…
The D.O.C. has spoken openly and often about his desire to put Dallas hip-hop on the map. Which isn’t exactly a new goal: Area hip-hop acts have been placing calls to Rand McNally for at least a decade, and while some have come close (say, Mad Flava, maybe, or Nemesis),…
The phrase “didn’t go as it should” starts off “Long Fucks Up,” the first track on Failure Plus’ Care.Less.Now. And that says plenty about what’s happening here. Failure Plus is a Denton band that has played live few times; this is its first full-length release. But you’d never guess that…
Andy Richardson is 17 years old, a student at North Mesquite High School in Mesquite, a skinny kid just this side of geeky who plays guitar in a band just this side of punk rock called Dogs in Heat. He’s also a “buzzer,” one of a few hundred high school…
