This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. And this is your brain on Bardo Pond. The Philadelphia quintet is touring behind its fourth album, Set and Setting, which, like the band’s name, comes from Timothy Leary’s addled reworking of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in his…
Word is that Centro-matic will head back into the studio in the next few weeks to record songs for its fifth album — a month or so before the band’s fourth disc is even available. Disc No. 4, tentatively titled All the Falsest Hearts Can Try, is due for release…
Shelton Williams was just another face in another crowd, an anonymous punk with safety pins in his clothes — and occasionally, his skin — playing in unknown bands with names like Buzzkill and worse. He was onstage from the time he was 15, yet rarely at the front, usually playing…
Rainer Maria completes about one new song a month. On the surface, this sounds a bit slow, especially considering that the Madison, Wisconsin, trio has relocated to rural Connecticut where their daily chores include feeding dogs, going to the library, and spending a few hours each day just working on…
Archer Prewitt is one of the hardest-working musicians in Chicago’s fertile indie-rock scene. A few years ago, the guitarist-singer-songwriter-comic-book artist moved into the neighborhood with his lounge-jazz outfit, the Coctails, and now he lends his guitar and composition skills to the rock and electronics of Windy City favorites the Sea…
Most record labels are populated with frustrated musicians, people who didn’t have the talent or the guts to stick it out over the long haul. Some just got tired of being screwed over by labels and decided to switch positions. Others never got further than their bedrooms, but they all…
The Artist Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (Arista/NPG Records) The Artist Formerly Known releases more albums in a year than most artists do in a lifetime — and, as he told MTV just last week, there’s plenty more in the vaults where that came from. Like a survivalist, the man…
Buddy Mohmed American Bedouin (Blue Cedars Records) Chicago-born, Dallas-based Buddy Mohmed is perhaps the finest jazz upright-bass player in Texas. He’s also a formidable jazz guitarist — particularly in his unique explorations of traditional Greek and Arab melodic themes, Mohmed’s trademark turf. American Bedouin is his debut, but these themes…
Ben Harper may look like a hipster jazzbo who just stepped out of a Gap khakis ad, but don’t let appearances fool you: This guy is a stone-cold hippie, and the vast majority of his sizable and growing following hails from the Grateful Dead/H.O.R.D.E./Phish school. This is to say, the…
Well, he’s got a band with him this time, in a venue he’s always haunted solo. Some fans may like that, and some may not, but anyone who caught Radney Foster with a full backing band last May at the Gypsy Tea Room can confirm that Foster with a supporting…
Of all the big, loud, stoopid rawk that’s crawled out of the Northwest this decade, the Supersuckers can reasonably lay claim to the title of proudest Luddites. Until a few years ago, the Seattle (by way of Tucson) quartet gleefully spat up a series of country-fried boogie-metal platters, each replete…
Dan “The Automator” Nakamura laughs when he recalls how his DJ career ended before it really began. The memory’s probably funnier now than it was then, especially since his latest album So…How’s Your Girl? — a partnership with another reformed DJ, Prince Paul, under the name Handsome Boy Modeling School…
Stereolab has often been maligned by critics for being too artsy and elite, and not without good reason. After all, well, it is. Many of the group’s songs are sung in French, and the lyrics frequently allude to Freud and Jung’s thoughts on psychoanalysis. But the criticism the band has…
Andre Williams doesn’t mince words. He doesn’t have time for that. He’s seen a promising R&B career go up in smoke, he’s fallen victim to drug addiction, and he’s spent more time hustling his way out of the gutter than he’d care to remember. So when this resuscitated soul man…
The kids file quietly into their seats, as though being led to a gruesome, inevitable fate. They are quiet, respectful, the shuffle of their feet the only sound echoing through the majestic concert hall. “Man, I hope this is cool,” whispers one bespectacled teenage boy to another. “Dude, it will…
Scene, heard As was previously reported, the pair of shows Tripping Daisy was supposed to play at the Curtain Club on November 12 and 13 will not happen. Instead, both nights have been changed to benefits for the family of guitarist Wes Berggren, who died on October 27. According to…
Beck Midnite Vultures (Interscope Records) Beck Hansen’s latest personality is his best joke yet, as this gawky-yet-funky white boy makes himself over as a smooth-talking, hard-partying sex machine, accompanied by the live equivalent of the Dust Brothers’ waxploitation soundtracks. Hiding behind gibberish less often than on previous releases, Beck tries…
Johnnie Taylor Gotta Get The Groove Back (Malaco) It should come as no surprise that the tracks with horns work better than those fleshed out (yeah, like a skeleton) with keyboard arrangements. The man may be from the old school — says so right there on track No. 2 (“I’m…
Atom and His Package Atom is Adam Goren, a slightly nerdy 24-year-old Philadelphian with an affinity for the metric system and a master’s degree in neuroscience. His Package is a Yamaha QY700 sequencer, a computer-keyboard arrangement programmed with more than 500 musical intruments, only a few of which Goren seems…
TLC Peering from the cover like a troika of Kraftwerk Smurfs, TLC followed up the gazillion-selling CrazySexyCool earlier this year with Fanmail, a disc pleasantly front-loaded with precocious attempts to goose the sometimes staid R&B crossover market. While it was still well-rooted in the kind of pop/hip-hop/smooth-R&B aesthetic that’ll rack…
Unity Church of Christianity is, perhaps, situated in an odd location for a place of worship: a few blocks north of most of the bars on Lower Greenville, directly across the street from a nondescript gas station, a few hundred feet south of another conglomerate of bars and restaurants. It’s…
They call themselves Hot Club of Cowtown, are based out of Austin, and play a vigorous acoustic mixture of Western swing and 1920s hot jazz. So one might expect that this trio’s genesis was sparked by some primal musical experience in an old Texas dancehall, or the Left Bank of…
