It’s little wonder that Susanna Hoffs got the old band back together again for one last spin down Amnesia Lane; the dormant superstar in her has yet to fully take to the soccer mom she has become. Three and a half years ago, Hoffs sat in a West Los Angeles…
There’s a great scene in Amy Heckerling’s Clueless where Alicia Silverstone’s character is talking with her friends at school about all the guys they know–about their sloppy clothes, their unkempt hair, their unshaven faces. They go on for a bit and then the camera cuts to a slo-mo shot of…
All 12 tracks and 20 minutes of Gop Ist Minee prove that if there’s hope that the Nintendo generation can have a truly mind-blowing rock experience all our own, it rests on the shoulders of five boys from Mobile, Alabama, known as XBXRX. Not faithfully planted in the annals of…
As the main project of K’s resident recording engineer, Phil Elvrum, the Microphones have always been half song and half studio experiment–juxtaposing sweet singing and delicate pop arrangements against blasts of guitar noise and tape manipulation in a way that has drawn inevitable comparisons to avant-popsters Olivia Tremor Control and…
Aaron Blount, lyricist and guitarist for Austin-based Knife in the Water, is but two degrees of separation from president-elect George Dubya, kind of. “He used to be my dad’s next-door neighbor, years back,” Blount laughs. “It’s really weird to see him on TV now. My dad spoke to him a…
Before booking shows that fall through, playing to audiences that don’t get it, or trying to put out records, their own name is often the first struggle the Sacramento band !!! encounters. Their records confuse record store employees on sight alone, and close friends often don’t recognize the band’s name…
The line winding around the auditorium at UC Irvine is a snapshot of all-inclusive hip-hop culture: Asian girls shuffle forward on dictionary-thick platforms; Jell-O-haired white punks with lip piercings scam for tickets; and black couples in leather and braids hold smoky sticks of incense. The large crowd of fans for…
Other than Flag Day, the holiday season is the best time for Scene, Heard because we seem to run into everyone, and since most of the crash sites happen to be parties, more than a few of the people you bump into are in the mood to talk. (What’s the…
The older Frank Black gets, the less he sounds like himself–something that probably happens to everybody at some point. But ever since Pudge let his monkey go to heaven, he flat out refuses to scream at traffic. Or at the powers that be. He’s like a tired prospectin’ punk gone…
Maybe I just can’t handle my Mickey’s Big Mouth the way I used to, or maybe it’s something else entirely, but whatever it is, these three EPs are going a long way toward buoying my spirits through the cold winter weeks, and so I’m recommending them to those among you…
Head to the Bronco Bowl tonight if for no other reason than to witness the two endpoints of commercial pop-punk’s current crop sharing one sweat-soaked, irrelevance-swathed stage. I’d say that’s a fair way of sizing up the graying Green Day and the still-green Get Up Kids, two bands who’ve made…
Who in the hell sucked out the feeling? Four and a half years ago, Knoxville power-poppers Superdrag had a hit single on the radio and a multi-album deal with Elektra to show Mom and Dad. Now it’s 2001 and about six people (the band and, I suspect, Mom and Dad)…
Listening to this new collection of John Prine’s sparse, gravel-and-molasses renditions of his own early material, it brings to mind how popular music has changed during the past three decades. When Prine first recorded most of these songs, serious-minded “singer-songwriters” were everywhere, soothing the battered spirits of aging hippies with…
It’s difficult to step into the future, or even the present, without one longing look at the past, one final backwards glance. Whether you’re casting off a terrible 12 months or simply afraid to leave behind such a perfect year, it’s natural–and necessary–to pause and reflect. OK, we’re really just…
During the five-year period he spent in seclusion at his home in New York’s Dakota Building, John Lennon periodically issued dispatches to the outside world confirming that he was content to be a devoted bread-baking husband who never left the house. The reality, as author Robert Rosen tells it in…
This could have been better. Should have been better. Why postpone the obvious? Two years ago, even last year, there was no reason to expect much/anything from Fixture. Why would you? All they had to show for themselves was 1998’s ultra=sound, which wasn’t much, but hey, they were just starting…
He wanders into the lobby of the Dallas Observer looking not a little lost and anonymous. It’s little surprise that no one asks him his business or offers him assistance, as his is not a recognizable face, and even when it’s revealed to a couple of curious passers-by who he…
December and January don’t really exist. Not in the music industry, anyway. There, the year is 10 months long, beginning–in Hallmark terms–just before Valentine’s Day, and ending around Thanksgiving. Why don’t December and January count, you ask? Let us ‘splain: People don’t buy new albums during those two months. Oh…
Right now, there’s a high-school kid somewhere perfecting a file-sharing system that makes Napster look like Columbia House. There are students working in college dorm rooms on file-compressing software that would render MP3s the equivalent of eight-track tapes. In a few years–or a few months, possibly–there will be technology on…
It’s a beautiful day in a beautiful world, or so it seems when listening to U2’s “Beautiful Day” (“It’s a beautiful day,” insists Bono, “don’t let it go away”) and Coldplay’s “Don’t Panic” (“We live in a beautiful world,” moans Chris Martin, “yeah, we do”) back to back…and back to…
Guitar Rock Is Dead: The Need, The Need is Dead; Thrones, White Rabbit and Sperm Whale EPs; Chicks on Speed, The Rereleases of the Unreleases; Shellac, 1000 Hurts; !!!, !!!; Mens Recovery Project; XBXRX; Lightning Bolt; When Babies Eat Pennies. Need I say more? Madonna, Music (Maverick): August: Sleater-Kinney had…
1. Badly Drawn Boy, The Hour of Bewilderbeast (XL Recordings): Damon Gough, a.k.a. Badly Drawn Boy, is mopey and sad; he’s the art-school kid who always got his ass kicked. He spilled out all of his emotional baggage on The Hour of Bewilderbeast, and it amounts to the best album…
