“Linden Boulevard represent, represent/Tribe Called Quest represent, represent/When the mic is in my hand, I’m never hesitant/My favorite jam back in the day was ‘Eric B. for President.'” When A Tribe Called Quest MC Phife Dawg dropped call-and-response lines as agile and tactile as the above on “Steve Biko (Stir…
Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings made a compelling argument for steering youth in the direction of becoming doctors and lawyers and such with their 1977 cover of Ed Bruce’s “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” They warned about the dangers of letting them “pick guitars and…
Though D.C.’s Rites of Spring is often cited as the ground zero of emo proper, Baltimore’s Lungfish–and lyricist-vocalist Daniel Higgs–provides the verbal altar to which the genre aspires. On its 1989 debut, Necklace of Heads, Lungfish sets the powerful wordplay bar high, and it’ll be an eon before another song-poet…
He sounds like any musician over the phone, like any burnt-to-a-crisp rock star who spent the previous night burning down the shed. He is, by turns, thoughtful and distracted, animated and weary. He crunches on a cup full of ice as he contemplates his answers, which are never inarticulate and…
Anybody who’s ever spent any amount of time with musicians knows that one of their biggest complaints is finding a place to play live. Certain clubs won’t book their bands because they don’t draw. Petty rivalries get blown out of proportion between neighboring scenes. (Hello, Dallas and Denton.) Rock clubs…
Joe Pernice says he hates his life, sings about suicide and flaming plane wrecks and sees more broken hearts than a bag of crushed Valentine’s Day candy, and the funny thing is, you might not notice at first. Almost every one of his songs makes Morrissey’s entire back catalog sound…
Apparently, Lift to Experience’s debut album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, has sold out of its inaugural 5,000-copy pressing in the U.K. (where its label, Bella Union, is based) and Europe. Still no word on a domestic distributor for the disc, and we hope no one is scared off by Crossroads’, uh,…
It’s possible that a sense of humor has joined common sense on the endangered species list of American foibles. Not that anybody’s noticed, mind you, but when a pair of wise-cracking DJs get canned for a practical joke–and not a very original one at that–well, it may be time to…
Contrary to the social mores that marked the era, the British demimonde found a way to take the starch out of its collars with the confessional smut novel that Victorian England perfected. Sure, France likes to believe that its raunch is saucier, but the French are far too sexually comfortable…
It’s a little before 1 p.m. in Portland when Jise, one of the MCs in the Arsonists, answers the phone in his hotel room. There’s a fog in his voice that betrays that he’s probably closer to unconsciousness than consciousness. “I’m just waking up, man,” he cracks, his voice creaking…
It’s hard to imagine a more self-effacing guitar hero than Doug Martsch. The leader and driving force of Built to Spill–Boise, Idaho’s greatest claim to musical immortality–Martsch brings to mind Robert Christgau’s old line (in reference to T-Bone Burnett) about being unable to resist a humble man with a proud…
Kathie Lee Gifford must be fuming. Pay some Honduran kids to earn an honest living cranking out clothes for Wal-Mart back in 1996 and you’re called a child-labor pariah. Sign their American counterparts to multimillion-dollar record deals a few years later and make them sweat to canned synth-pop tracks and…
Last week, we received a bit of good news for all street-level pharmaceutical suppliers in the greater Austin area, and maybe a few around here. Seems that after five years and one completed and abandoned album, Mr. Peppermint’s son, Gibby Haynes, and his band, the Butthole Surfers, will finally have…
It hardly seems possible that Radiohead’s latest album, Amnesiac, has managed to confound the masses even more than last year’s Kid A. Touted by the less imaginative as Kid B, the miserable brother of Kid A, Amnesiac has split Radiohead fans into two distinct camps: the faithful obsessives and the…
Julian Casablancas, the 21-year-old man who fronts the hotly tipped New York City band the Strokes, has a knack for distilling his essence down to a line or two in really great songs full of the Velvet Underground’s primeval four-four thud, Television’s wiry guitar chatter and his own gloriously defiant…
Will Ian Svenonius ever stop? The kicking and screaming former instigator of the fight-this-generation youth revolt of Nation of Ulysses felt immediate and pertinent back on 1991’s punk planet. The desperate attitude that the band wore as earnestly as an Oliver North oath and his chic suspicion of adults went…
The cop said he’d been following the van for five miles, maybe more. About five or 10 minutes, he said. The cop was exaggerating. Probably. No, the cop was definitely exaggerating. He wouldn’t wait 10 minutes for the van to pull over. He wouldn’t wait five miles. No cop would…
Don’t be fooled: Mandarin is a real Texas band. Its name is Chinese, and it certainly doesn’t play straight country music or sport 10-gallon hats, but its music sounds just like Texas looks and feels–scorching, expansive, leisurely. Being a Texas band is not about singing with a twang or about…
Like the Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan and the Afghan Wigs’ Greg Dulli, former American Music Club songwriter and vocalist Mark Eitzel has a husky baritone that gels nicely with his literate lyrics of emotional self-evisceration. Tales of drunken abandon and the inevitable laments that follow after liquor’s cloudy veil evaporates…
“I’m going to be playing with the Ed Soph Trio down there,” saxophonist Joe Lovano says from New York of his upcoming performance at the Dallas Museum of Art. “I haven’t done that in a long time, go somewhere and play with some local guys. But I’ve known Ed for…
At this rate, the only thing Epic Records hasn’t released bearing Stevie Ray Vaughan’s name on the spine is a double-disc collection of his entire funeral–with a limited edition third disc featuring the sound of the grave diggers pitching dirt atop his casket. After all, you would have thought that…
As it turns out, Tricky’s been making records even he hates–contract-killers, he might call them, if not audience-killers in the process. (Everything since 1995’s Maxinquaye has been one “fuck-off” record after another, he explains, as in: “Fuck off, I’m not giving people what they want,” he offers in his new…
