The Mag Seven Eighth Round Knockout (333 Industries) 12Lb. Test Harm’s Way (Self-released) It’s hard to escape your past, even harder if you’re a musician. There are very few fresh starts, if only because there are old albums to refer to, hazy memories of live performances. New projects are defined…
Metallica S & M (Elektra Records) If Load and Re-Load and an album full of Bob Seger, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Thin Lizzy covers (last year’s Garage Inc.) didn’t succeed in putting Metallica over as just another Rock Band, then this surely will. No matter how the group cares to spin…
You couldn’t invent a better parody of the brain-dead, testosterone-crazed, wanna-be hip-hop buffoonery that has captured the video-damaged imaginations of the Musicland-shopping-mall suburban pubescentry circa the millennium. Which doesn’t mean that the idiotic Insane Clown Posse isn’t ripe for satirizing. New York writer Mike Rubin and Detroit comics artist Mark…
Bands like G. Love and Special Sauce ain’t so special now, as though they ever were. Love and the boys are just another blues-folk-rap trio, a combo too often heard in the form of mediocre white guys fumbling for grace, soul, and wit. It’s a concept that’s neither promising on…
Moby (Richard Hall) is a hard guy to figure out. Over the course of his career, he has followed a variety of different musical muses and professed a range of beliefs. He says he’s a follower of Christ and often writes songs that indirectly praise God, yet he doesn’t consider…
Probably the only positive thing that can be said about the “new” Bob Marley album, Chant Down Babylon, is that it doesn’t include yet another version of “Buffalo Soldier.” Assembled by Bob’s son Stephen Marley, the disc features digital-age duets between the late Marley and Busta Rhymes, Rakim, Lauryn Hill…
Pleasant Grove and Pinkston will hold a listening party for their respective debut discs on December 8 at The Dark Room. No official release date has been set for either record, but they should both be available (on Last Beat Records) sometime before the end of the month. In other…
SAN ANTONIO — The crowd was so large that about one-third of the estimated 1,000 mourners had to huddle around an underequipped Peavy speaker outside. But even more impressive than the large turnout at the November 23 funeral of Doug Sahm, who succumbed to heart disease five days earlier while…
The Internet is a capitalist’s dream come true: Slap up a virtual storefront, talk someone into giving you a product to sell, then sit back and watch the dollars roll in. Everyone’s getting involved — “dot-com” is almost as ubiquitous as “the” these days — but only a handful manage…
Call the members of Nocturne “industrial.” Call them “hard rock” or “dark wave,” whatever that is. Just don’t call them Goth — not to their faces anyway. Pretty much anything else is fine with the group; they’re not sure what they are yet, but they insist they know what they…
Occasionally when Crash Vinyl performs, the band is joined onstage by a pair of young women in bright-colored wigs and tight leather hot pants. The girls writhe around at the front of the stage, much to the delight of the audience — well, most of it, anyway. They are the…
Dr. Dre Chronic 2001 (Aftermath/Interscope Records) Dr. Dre is still the best hip-hop producer this side of The RZA or Prince Paul and Dan The Automator; he’s among the handful who could almost be called a composer because of his preference for live instrumentation over tried-and-tired Parliament-Funkadelic swipes. And Chronic…
Cary Pierce You Are Here (Aware Records) Cary Pierce is the eternal straight man, taking himself so seriously that his every word and gesture are too good to ignore. You Are Here is an early Christmas present, wrapped in lyrics so unabashedly earnest they make James Taylor sound like John…
Kid Rock When, in the near future, we look back at the state of “alternative music” circa 1999, the big story will most likely be the emergence of (choose one, since all of these “genres” are equally unsatisfying): aggro, rap-rock, or asshole-rock. Still, it really isn’t fair to paint Limp…
If Aimee Mann had sold one album for each word written about her, she’d make Alanis Morissette look like the struggling indie artist she probably ought to be. Nobody gets more press for having done so apparently little: one hit a very long time ago (“Voices Carry,” back when Mann…
Earlier this year, Arlie Carstens was enjoying the kind of life he always dreamed of having when he was growing up in Seattle, spending all of his time snowboarding and listening to Jawbox records. He had just finished recording his debut album with his band Juno, This is the Way…
We live in a time when country music is divided into two nations: the commercial dictatorship of Nashville, and the anarchic republic ineptly named alternative country, Americana, No Depression music — anything but what it always was and still is, which is basically country-rock. And the rule seems to be…
Wes Berggren and his older brother Andy didn’t grow up with many rules and restrictions placed on them. Wes and Andy didn’t really need that kind of discipline, and their parents didn’t believe in it anyway. Don and Joan Berggren let their sons run around naked for the first few…
Beastie Boys The Sounds of Science (Grand Royal/Capitol) For 20 bucks, you can visit beastieboys.com and make your own best-and-rest-of: Pick 40 songs from the available 150 (loads of singles and imports, though not a single one from Licensed to Ill), slap on a title (say, Three Hebrews and One…
Sara Hickman Newborn (Sleeveless) No doubt about it: Getting dropped from Elektra way back when was the best thing that ever happened to Sara Hickman. If ever anyone doubted that signing to a major label can corrupt even the most well-meaning among us, listen only to the album and a…
Late to the Buzzcocks camp, I was the fan who knew of the band’s impact long before I ever heard “Orgasm Addict” and thus the fan who wonders why the band would bother to hijack its way back into ’90s consciousness. The band’s original sound is so pristinely punchy, such…
Joe King — the frontman better known as Joe Queer — has been at it for almost 20 years, and the only thing that’s really changed in that time is the amount of beer he ingests each night (currently leveled off at, uh, none) and who he’s playing with this…
