In other words, “Show up and play, or you’re off the playlist.” One of those annual you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-give-you-a-reach-around affairs, KISS-FM’s holiday shindig serves up a heapin’ helpin’ of ho-ho-hum; nothing says, “Happy Holidays, suckers!” like a serenade from LFO (pronounced ’round my house as, “Hell if I know”) and Natural (a…
I don’t envy those on the frontlines of the neo-soul revolution. Sure, there are perks: fame, fortune, a permanent spot on MTV2, the chance to hang out virtually every day with Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson of the Roots. But think of the demands: On the right you’ve got the neo-traditionalists, those…
To basically everyone who heard it, Shelby Lynne earned the right to call her breakthrough album I Am Shelby Lynne–no matter that it was her sixth full-length and the one to win her the Best New Artist Grammy. The record’s flaxen weave of brutal country confession and elegant soul reserve–essentially,…
Who the fuck is Nikki Sudden? And why would a small indie label in Bloomington, Indiana, nearly go bankrupt reissuing 10 of his albums from the ’80s that never sold well in the first place? Unless you’re eternally tuned to your local college radio station, you probably don’t know that…
Regina Chellew is sitting in Tami Thomsen’s office at Last Beat Records on Commerce Street, talking about her new album. It is her solo debut, released under the name Chao, and, for the most part, it is a true solo effort, with Chellew recording almost every note on the disc…
For some reason, the first time I listened to Macavity’s debut EP, Falling Hard in the Key of E, I imagined a world ruled by 13-year-old super-geniuses who worshipped Macavity in between updating the theory of relativity and repainting everything in sight in glittery pinks and purples. That said, this…
Trying to cajole dissipating old farts into retirement is as tired a chore as they are; rockers, like athletes and whores, know not when to play their final encore, deaf as they are from years of prolonged applause. So let them play on and on and on and on; there’s…
Ah, the punk-turned-acoustic balladeer. It seems to be a common affliction–those angry rockers who suddenly unplug their electric guitars to become sensitive singer-songwriters. I suppose you can trace it back to Billy Bragg, through Bob Mould in his post-Hüsker Dü days and via Nirvana’s Unplugged album, right up to the…
The greater Dallas-Fort Worth area is quite a haul from Providence, Rhode Island, but on Friday and Saturday night this weekend, you’d be forgiven if you forgot that for a while, so admirably do the two bands headlining Rubber Gloves reimagine Rhode Island School of Design alumni the Talking Heads’…
The protocol for a so-called post-rock show like this one almost demands that the crowd avoid any overt or spontaneous signs of enjoyment while the music is playing. Between bursts of song-ending applause, audience members should stand still, ineptly imitating mannequins in the window of a Salvation Army thrift shop,…
It’s too early to tell what effect, if any, the recent North Texas New Music Festival will have on the fortunes of local bands, but it’s already safe to say at least one thing: It definitely succeeded in putting asses in seats. So to speak. There wasn’t a single club…
You’ve heard the story so often, it may as well have happened to you. And maybe it did. Young band, barely out of high school, gets signed to a major-label recording contract. Releases a pair of solid albums–adventurous by major-label standards, good-to-great by anyone’s–yet is ignored almost from the moment…
It’s the same thing all over again for Sonic Boom, who has made a career out of repeating himself. He’s back from the far-reaching cosmos of Experimental Audio Research to once again plumb the depths of the eternal song, with guitar in tow, as he did in the great Spacemen…
Smart and smirky art project (The Worst!, an Ed Wood concept “musical”) and risky-frisky Social Statement (Blacks ‘n’ Jews, “marching together two by two”) now out of the way, Josh Alan Friedman gets back to playing lissome, smart-ass Hebrew guitar-slinger making with the strip-club soundtrack circa Jack Ruby and the…
I got over my problems reconciling blink-182’s quasi-libertarian attitude and its major-label affiliation the first time I learned how fond the trio is of big-bosomed porn stars–those women’s services don’t come cheap, so who better to finance the backstage peep show than MCA Records and its multinational parent corporation, Vivendi…
If the destruction of September 11 took with all the lives and the buildings America’s love affair with irony (as more than a few self-serving media types have opined), why didn’t it also subsume the self-perpetuating infantilization so many twentysomethings in rock bands seem to cling to like a life…
Twenty-three years after his band bowed with its John Cale-produced macho-fey punk-pop-a-roll, the Paul McCartney of Squeeze (not the John Lennon–too comfy-cozy for such nonsense) at last goes solo. Turns out old pal and partner Chris Difford, less performer than proud papa, couldn’t stomach the idea of hitting the road…
The last time we were at Dan’s Bar in Denton, we were sharing a table and a few beers with Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios owner Josh Baish and his girlfriend, talking about Baish’s troubles getting his own bar off the ground. The “Dan” in Dan’s Bar, Dan Mojica, had been…
In the mid- and late ’60s, Dave Davies’ riffs sprouted switchblades in brother Ray’s sad, literate pop gardens for tunes as tough, soulful, crisp, compact and brilliant as anything from the British invasion or subsequent rock incursions and coups. Give the People What We Want sports the good taste to…
Given the blissfully strung-out nature of the records he makes as Spiritualized–grandiose affairs in which the space-rock cosmos are studded with swirls of free-jazz skronk and warm gusts of gospel-music presence–you wouldn’t expect Jason Pierce to be an amped-up conversationalist, breathlessly regaling you with tales of rock-star debauchery (though they…
Every so often a record comes along that, no matter how much you want to hate it, you can’t help loving it. This year’s best example of that is Is This It, the maddeningly addictive debut album by the ludicrously hyped New York City band the Strokes. A close second,…
The last five years have been tough on the Butthole Surfers (who?). Their 1996 album Electric Larryland spawned the unlikely hit “Pepper,” an odd blend of rap and grunge that was the first taste of mainstream success for a group better known for scatological imagery and hair-raising orgies of psychedelic…
