Bruce Goldberg knows that a Japanese import version of Marilyn Manson’s new Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) exists. He’s seen it, held it in his hands, stuffed it into a bubble-wrap envelope. In fact, his company, Weathermen Records, recently shipped 123 copies of the disc…
Remember that anti-drug commercial with that really hot chick who goes nuts and trashes a kitchen with a frying pan? The ad hit you over the head with its message: Drugs are bad. Well, the British band Electrasy has issued a counterpoint. Their new album, In Here We Fall, also…
Did Beck Hansen really change the layout of the pop cosmos? That is, were folks (or headz or peeps or what have you) mixing and matching genres in three-minute chunks like it was going out of style before it was, um, in style? Like, duh. The Beastie Boys could school…
Born out of the same Boise, Idaho, scene that unleashed Built to Spill, Caustic Resin takes the archetypal “scorched-earth guitar dirge” aesthetic even further, wielding a rambunctious, acidic barroom-blues sensibility and a rather dour sense of humor. “Bring a Mormon to a show and receive 10 percent off at the…
And so it arrives, a century–give or take a few years–later than expected, but worth the wait, as so few things ever are. It seems like forever ago (perhaps because it was) that Kim Pendleton and Paul Quigg and that revolving-door rhythm section stood on the Galaxy Club stage and…
Awake and alert on a Sunday afternoon, Rhythm of Black Lines frontman Clint Newsom interviews like every unfamous rock musician should. He’s enthusiastic about the music and answers without any misunderstanding or aloofness. I don’t have to ask the stupid questions about how the band started and their influences, as…
The great major-label mergings and purgings of the last several years have lost hundreds of people their jobs–but another tragic result is that many artists have been trapped in record-release limbo. The rootsy rock band Whiskeytown is one of them, and that’s left rock fans unable to hear Pneumonia, arguably…
For much of his life, Sun Ra lived in a Philadelphia brownstone. His name was listed in the phone book under “Ra, Sun.” In a photo taken in front of his brownstone, he looks like any other middle-aged man standing in front of his home: Somewhat proudly, he stares into…
Rhett Miller nailed it when former Dallas Observer staff writer and London resident Christina Rees caught up with him (“The sound of Deep Ellum,” June 22) at an open-mike-night performance at London’s Kashmir Club earlier this year: “I mean, you get to England, and you expect the bands to be…
Greil Marcus is a rock-critic legend. A graduate of the late-’60s Berkeley scene, Marcus began his rock and social criticism with then fledgling Rolling Stone magazine and quickly became notable for his highbrow style and brainy approach. His obvious talent and his professorial passion for dissecting rock and roll had…
Named after the nautical pleasure craft of Emilio Largo, Bond supervillain in Thunderball, Disco Volante sounds more like the kind of music Miss Moneypenny might be tempted to blast in the office when M wasn’t around. On the surface, it’s worldly-wise pop; the opening track, “146 Degrees,” takes “The Theme…
First time I saw The Artist Then Known as Prince, he was ushering in 1983 with a set culled from 1999, then his latest and greatest. He funked and spunked (his guitar did, anyway) like a man leading a proper Revolution (ah, Wendy and Lisa…), and even a 15-year-old then…
John Darnielle, the one-man band known as the Mountain Goats, is too smart for his own good. Overqualified for his rock-and-roll songwriting vocation, he’s as much at ease expounding Mexican mythology and quoting Eugene O’Neill as he is peeling off a standard love-ditty chorus. Releasing albums with the regularity of…
Ronnie Dawson, Dallas’ legendary Blond Bomber, released his first single, “Action Packed” b/w “I Make the Love” in 1958, when he was 19 years old. Since then, he’s gone from adored up-and-comer to hidden hero to comeback kid. During the 1960s and ’70s, he bounced from one label to another…
Stevie Wonder: The Wonder Years It was 1971 and Stevie Wonder had just turned 21, but when he reached into the trust that was to hold the estimated $30 million he had earned with such hits as “For Once in My Life,” “My Cherie Amour,” “I Was Made to Love…
Nearly four years after she busted out of town and broke big-time, Erykah Badu returns–unbowed, unbroken, and somehow, unchanged. It seems the revolution she began in February 1997, when Baduizm sold in the millions and “On & On” played on and on every time you switched on MTV, has yet…
Back when electronica was the next big thing–around the time the only things that needed counting in Florida were dead German tourists–Norman Cook was just another washed-up pop musician. Little wonder the former member of the Housemartins and Beats International decided an identity change was in order; better to check…
As far as the blues go, I might as well have just heard Robert Johnson for the first time last week. It’s a form I’m just getting familiar with, having just discovered the Howlin’ Wolfs and the Willie Dixons and the John Lee Hookers. Dunno why it took so long…
Oh, to be around in the glory days of the Drunken Irish Bastard, when chinless messiahs such as James Joyce, Damon Runyon, John Ford, Stephen Foster, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Eugene O’Neill were fighting and fucking and falling down all the way to the top. I don’t know what happened,…
There’s not much need for Christmas discs once you own A Charlie Brown Christmas and…aw, heck, that’s about it as far as this Hanukkah Harry’s concerned. But this collection of local artists doing the jingle-bell rock contains a version of Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here” worth owning–a peppy, sparkly…
Ken Burns apologizes for his “filibustering,” but it doesn’t stop him from talking and talking until the original question becomes a faint memory in the wake of an answer that goes on and on. But perhaps as much is to be expected from Burns, the documentarian whose films begin as…
A sort-of interview with J. Mascis, Part One: It’s not that J. Mascis is sullen or inarticulate or any of the accusatory words with which he’s generally described. He’s extremely–you might even say legendarily–reserved when talking to the press. But if you’re willing to give just a little leeway to…
