The birth of Bleed American was a fairly adventurous one: After a difficult two-album turn with Capitol Records, Jimmy Eat World decided to strike out on its own in 2000, parting ways with its label and management and mortgaging its financial future to fund the recording of the album on…
It starts with a phone call and one question: “Have you heard about the Toadies breaking up?” A week or so later, we’ve heard that same question over and over in phone calls and e-mails, and we’ve even asked it a few times ourselves, but we still don’t know the…
There’s something entirely too precious about a young, indie-rock musician with a classic music background. It’s a fact you just can’t shake out of your head. You’ll see some skinny, androgynous, moppy-haired hipster onstage adorned in whatever young-adult Geranimals are fashionably out of season and think–awww, s/he must’ve looked absolutely…
The liner notes for Eternal and Lowdown, Ray Wylie Hubbard’s new record, open thusly: “If F. Scott Fitzgerald had known Ray Wylie Hubbard, there’s no way Fitzgerald would ever have conceived that notion about American lives having no second act, much less put forth the idea.” And if the story…
Though he routinely denies it–including about seven times in the half-hour I spend with him–Pharrell Williams is dying to be a rock star. You can tell with one look, if he’s got one of his trademark mesh trucker’s caps on, an ugly yellow or red thing with a crude depiction…
It ain’t easy being easy listening. With a voice that’s smoother than satin undergarments and equally as alluring, the Nigerian born Helen Folsade Adu to an African father and English mother has the dubious honor of being one of the few mixed-race vocalists in a genre that tolerates camouflaged ethnicity…
With a voice incisive enough to slice through Kevlar and a body that’s more butter than Land O’ Lakes, Bed-Stuy native Inga Marchand fuses equal parts LL Cool J braggadocio and early Boogie Down Productions’ street sagas as rapper Foxy Brown. And with Broken Silence, her third album, Brown shows…
In 1971, Marvin Gaye released his classic What’s Going On, and all hell broke loose in the world of R&B. Smiling hit makers became serious artists and social commentators, and within months Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield had all followed suit, creating their own distinctive brand of soul…
Citing exhaustion, Aden Holt has decided to take a hiatus from One Ton Records, a break that began July 9 and will continue until, he jokes, “I win the lottery.” Meaning: One Ton is pretty much gone for good, ending the local label’s five-year run as the best record label…
The six members of Detroit-based D12 (it’s short for Dirty Dozen; the discrepancy between the actual number of rappers in the group and its double-size moniker has something to do with the fact that each person’s alias is also counted) made a pact years ago that if any of them…
The man known as The Legendary Fritz sits on a concrete slab next to the makeshift parking lot beneath the Dallas Observer office on Commerce Street, explaining what happened between a week ago and today. To kick-start the story he’s about to tell, he laughs a little, sighs a little…
You don’t have to be a paranoid android to know who’s gonna show up at a Radiohead show. It’s like a modern-rock rogues gallery: You’ve got your music-nerd types (the guys in the seventh row squinting hard at guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s new bank of keyboards), your Top 40 refugees (the…
When he walked onstage at the 20th anniversary of the Tejano Conjunto Festival at San Antonio’s Rosedale Park in May, Steve Jordan was resplendent in a purple jumpsuit with gold buccaneer sleeves. But what stood out most was how frail the 62-year-old accordion legend looked. Like a skeleton clinging to…
Anybody who caught Prince’s tour last fall witnessed two small miracles of nature. One was a 42-year-old man cram his petite, wiry frame into suits, capes and ankle-length coats that looked like leftovers from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’s wardrobe while dancing around in stilt-like high heels, inciting every future…
Chomsky will unveil Onward Quirky Soldiers, its follow-up to 1999’s A Few Possible Selections for the Soundtrack of Your Life, on August 18, with a shindig at Trees that will also include performances by The Deathray Davies and Legendary Crystal Chandelier. But if you want an advance listen to one…
Now that Coldplay and Travis have made a dent here in the states, we can certainly expect more Brit melancholia. With that in mind, meet Turin Brakes, who follows pretty much the same acoustic folk-rock blueprint on its debut, The Optimist LP. A humorless south London version of Tenacious D,…
The cover of the White Stripes’ third release depicts the Detroit duo surrounded by shadowy Ninja assassins who, as the last page of the CD booklet reveals, turn out to be friendly members of a media circus. Could this be a not-so-subtle indication of how Jack and Meg White feel…
The title on the cover of Timo Ellis’ first solo effort is The Enchanted Forest of Timo Ellis, while the one on the spine of the disc reads The Enchanting Schizophrenia of Timo Ellis. This is a telling detail for an album (four-song EP, actually) as all over the place…
Practice isn’t supposed to begin for a few more minutes, so [DARYL] bassist Jeff Parker sits on one of the two couches outside of the room the band rents at Universal Rehearsal, smoking a Winston and ashing into an empty Dr Pepper can he found in the hallway. Leaning into…
Sunny is hardly the word you’d expect to come out of the mouth of a metal man. You know the type. Erratically long hair. Painted-on leather pants. Studded wristbands. Guitars played while standing with feet as far apart as limbs allow. Names with umlauts over vowels just because it looks…
A year ago, all Bryce Avary wanted was a record contract. He had just released a five-song EP, under the name The Rocket Summer, and he used it as a calling card, sending it to every label he’d heard of and a few that he hadn’t. Avary was just finishing…
In the last few golden weeks of Napster’s doomed existence, I was file-sharing like, um, it was going out of business. I couldn’t get enough, mostly of dance remixes of Top 40 tunes I had no interest in paying import prices for: the Neptunes’ urbane reading of Sade’s “By Your…
