Sixty people — primarily white twentysomethings with goatees and dreadlocks — crowd into a small storefront in the Western Addition area of San Francisco. Musicians carrying saxophone cases and drumsticks slip through the crowd up to the front. It’s immediately apparent that this is not your ordinary Sunday church service…
Even though it’s plainer than the nose on a face, the point that sometimes gets obscured in folk music is it’s music for folks, for the people. Now that doesn’t automatically make Ricky Martin a folkie because he sells shiploads of CDs, concert tickets, T-shirts, and teen magazines to the…
In Dallas, listening to electronic music usually means sitting at home with the headphones, shaking your ass in the privacy of your own bedroom. (Translation: not much fun and sort of pathetic.) The dance clubs where most DJs perform are places where the music comes in a distant third behind…
Pan-American 360 Business/360 Bypass (Kranky Records) Welcome aboard flight 360 Business/360 Bypass, the second full-length, low-pulse release from Pan-American, also known as Mark Nelson. This six-song, hour-long collection of songs is a rhythmic trip with traces of everything from bossa nova to dub bass to downtempo beats to warm synths…
The Limes Smile (Deluxe Records) There isn’t much about The Limes’ debut that stands out on the first listen — not one song you have to hear again right away before you can go any further, a roadblock with a chorus that sticks in your head like a round from…
The Pretenders Back in the heyday of new wave, band names were often dipped in irony, like The Pretenders. But now, some two decades later, The Pretenders have proved themselves anything but false icons. For at a time when so much rock seems forced and/or faked, The Pretenders are one…
The last time we wrote about a benefit concert, we were publicly denounced from the stage at the Curtain Club by co-owner Doug Simmons. We didn’t mean any harm by what we wrote, we just felt it necessary to point out the irony of loud rock bands playing Black Sabbath…
It’s been a full six months since Swivel and Blush last played together. Simply billed as the July 3 Show, it was the last of several set up by the kids in the bands and their friends at the Bishop Arts District’s Oak Cliff Coffee House. With vocals sent out…
The Melvins, legendary innovators of brutal intelli-sludge heavy rock, like to challenge their audience as much as they do their drum heads and amplifier outputs. As vocalist and guitarist Buzz Osborne says, the band’s modus operandi is to “screw with people. That’s what I like.” Speaking from his Los Angeles…
More a Legend Than a Band. That was the fitting title bestowed on the one album made by The Flatlanders when it was finally released in 1990, nearly 20 years after the group formed by Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock actually recorded it. Now, a decade later,…
Sean Donovan knows better than most people about the kind of support musicians need. He spends his days sending money to songwriters, making sure they all get what they deserve. The money belongs to the publishing house he works for in New York (the highly regarded Harry Fox Agency), and…
Michael Penn MP4 (Days Since a Lost Time Accident) (57 Records/Epic Records) Turns out it’s possible to admire, even cherish an album without really liking it — no, make that feeling it, deep within that unknowable place only music can reach. There’s no escaping the effort that went into this…
Ty Herndon Steam (Epic Records) Ten or so spins in (OK, maybe one), and it’s still hard to find something to say about Ty Herndon’s latest that someone else hasn’t used before to condemn Nashville for its absolute lack of originality. Every clever metaphor and analogy is already spoken for,…
Ray Charles Just once, it would be nice if Ray Charles came to town and didn’t play some swank, million-dollar shrine to old money. Plop him in the Meyerson Symphony Center or Bass Performance Hall, and you might as well stick him behind a glass case and let the blue-hairs…
There are literary theorists who propose that there are but a few basic stories in the world, perhaps little more or even less than can be counted on the fingers of both hands. Hence every novel — or, for that matter, every story told by a movie or reported in…
Nothing like arriving at work on a Monday morning to find an e-mail inbox full of questionable advice from even more questionable sources, such as one scrappy reader who wanted me to rip out my own tongue and hang myself with it. Thanks for the kind words, buddy, but I…
Fire & Skill: The Songs of the Jam Various artists (Ignition/Epic Records) This probably seemed like a good idea back in the old days, when the world gave a steaming crap about Oasis: Bros Noel and Liam Gallagher would assemble and bookend a tribute to their rave fave that isn’t…
Stumptone Stumptone (Two Ohm Hop Records) On first listen, Stumptone’s self-titled debut is as all over the place as you’d expect from a batch of songs recorded all over the place (singer-guitarist Chris Plavidal’s living room, Dave Willingham’s studio, the stage at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios) at various times during…
Rock critics shouldn’t be allowed to review albums till the 19th go-round — long after the initial buzz has worn off, long after the thrill (or, for that matter, terror) of listening to something for the first time has dissipated. Beck Were such a rule in place, there wouldn’t exist…
James McMurtry For the past 10 years, James McMurtry has spent his energy penning great songs and trying to avoid a certain Dallas sports-radio talk-show host. We both wish things were different. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome James McMurtry.” David Lettermen then motioned to a long-haired fellow in round glasses…
Macy Gray Much has been made of Macy Gray’s come-from-behind tackle: out of nowhere, a new voice, a new attitude, a new sound for our tired ears — all contained in one remarkable debut, On How Life Is. Well, not entirely new — the former USC film student’s tunes pack…
Wavy gray hair and translucent-rimmed glasses restore the aura of an archivist to Tary Owens. His soft, raspy voice and deliberate words temporarily hush as he closes his eyes to catch the music, the vision of that first prison experience: It is again the summer of 1963. Owens turns his…
