Like George W. Bush, the Los Angeles-by-way-of-San Francisco band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club can’t give it to you straight but looks perplexed by efforts to be savvy. Named for Brando’s gang in The Wild One, this trio echoes Dubya’s political protocol that dresses up Reagan and Big Daddy’s ideas and…
It’s not so much that longevity gets a bad rap these days as much as it is people seem to have forgotten what it means, much like social drinking and casual sex. It still happens, sure, but it’s pushed to the background and kept hush-hush. In entertainment it’s even worse…
Stake a place near the front of the stage at the Gypsy Tea Room tonight to see a guy trying hard to define himself playing music that works against that. A self-styled Paul Westerberg type, young media darling Pete Yorn’s debut album, musicforthemorningafter (cute, huh?), presents a ruggedly handsome guy…
Ever seen a lanky man walk onstage wearing nothing but a pair of corduroy jeans, a battered straw cowboy hat, boots, the lines of a bra on his chest and a handlebar mustache over his lip crudely scrawled in Magic Marker? If you ever caught the Cows during their most…
The more Todd Deatherage flew to New York to play shows with his buddy Rhett Miller, the more it was obvious that he’d eventually stop flying back. And when he came back after his most recent NYC jaunt, a trip that included sharing a bill with the bicoastal Miller at…
Since it first started in 1993, Quasi has made a career out of wedding catchy, up-tempo pop music to some of the gloomiest lyrics around. Its new album, The Sword of God–and first for the Touch & Go label–is no exception. Songwriter/keyboardist Sam Coomes and his ex-wife, drummer Janet Weiss,…
On May 25, 2001, there stood on a single London stage Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon–all told, “a fucking gorgeous bunch of blokes,” in the estimation of one Peter Townshend, who’s known his share of rough boys. Their names rang a bell. They looked familiar, if…
Make no mistake about it; Germans know something we don’t. Fans of art-damaged pastiche spit out by German-launched oddities such as Stereo Total, Chicks on Speed, Go Plus and the Notwist know this for a fact. The few American unbelievers were slapped silly when Mouse on Mars came stateside earlier…
The fervid fever that spawned and defined American Punk was as much a personal response to the blasé culture of the early 1980s as it was a middle finger to late-’70s music. You know the usual suspects: Reagan and his cronies, disco, Frampton Comes Alive. It’s as cliché as a…
Question: Why do we have to pick on a band from around here that’s actually doing good things? Answer: Because, obviously, it doesn’t matter what we say. Not in Drowning Pool’s case anyway. (The question, by the way, was posed by a publicist for the band’s label, Wind-Up Records.) The…
Irv Karwelis, Idol Records’ honcho, sent over the Onward Quirky Soldiers advance along with sale figures for the first single off said disc, Chomsky’s sophomore effort that rocks like a senior on the last day of high school. Turns out the three-song disc, fleshed out by skeletal demos, is moving…
Through a sparse guitar line and viola-and-drum interlude breaks a world-weary voice that intones, “I can’t go back to my favorite bar, ’cause now I’m sure that there’s some lessons that I’m never gonna learn.” In “Back to School,” the second song on Thalia Zedek’s debut solo album, Been Here…
Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote, “Earth’s crammed with heaven,” and if you believe Will Johnson, most of it is crammed into Mississippi. To him, you can see heaven driving north on Highway 61, on the way to Clarksdale, or when you’re sitting on the banks of the Yazoo River,…
It’s a good thing the folks who handle Will Oldham–the songwriting savant known as Bonnie Prince Billy and Palace and Palace Songs and Palace Brothers and The Palace Drawbridge Is Closing Let’s Storm the Castle (OK, just kidding about that one)–are on the ball about providing a copy of his…
There, on one corner of Sixth Street and Congress Avenue, stood Ray Davies, hiding behind don’t-fuck-with-me shades. Just across the street stood David Byrne, camouflaged from head to foot in khaki, his omnipresent red backpack draped across his shoulder. Davies looked larger than life, in a way–like a Rock Legend,…
As we mentioned last week, Flickerstick has signed with Epic Records, capitalizing on its Bands on the Run notoriety in the manner everyone thought it would. Initial plans call for Epic to re-release F-Stick’s debut, Welcoming Home the Astronauts, in October, with a pair of songs–“Smile” and “Execution by X-mas…
Though Denton likes to believe it was the home of Texas’ best psych rock in the 1990s, that title actually goes to Houston’s The Mike Gunn. This early-’90s quintet brazenly brandished guitar indulgence that warped more minds in the Lone Star State and beyond since the six-oh days of Josefus,…
By this point, there isn’t anyone out there still eager to play the serious-music card, is there? No one champing at the bit to discredit hip-hop or heavy metal or twee-pop as lesser forms of a medium that counts boring ol’ Beethoven or Jeff Lynne or whoever as despot? If…
Leave it to ex-Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton to give a new meaning to the saying “beating a dead horse.” The guy who’s pop-cult fame was bound by wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with images of Jesus masturbating (that had to be airbrushed out of the band’s Spin cover shoot)…
A year after the debut of her critically acclaimed first album, there are those who are still asking, “Who is Jill Scott?” You can hardly blame them, because the answer is multiple choice. Scott is R&B’s latest It Girl and the current poster child for the neo-soul movement (see: Lauryn…
La Crescenta is hardly known as a hotbed for rock and roll, nor is it the place you’d expect to find America’s most prominent dance/rock group. But this far northern Los Angeles suburb in Crescenta Valley, tucked up against the Verdugo Mountains, is where Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland, otherwise…
Whoever it was who first said bad things come in threes–it was probably Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Younger, that poor, stoic sap–had obviously never met Beyoncé Knowles. She’s the undisputed focal point of Houston’s Destiny’s Child, but she knows better than to pass herself off as a solo act. It…
