After coordinating countless benefits for Denton’s Good/Bad Art Collective, Chris Weber is used to dealing with unique situations, controlling them as much as possible. For example, Inflicted Music — the benefit that partly inspired Weber’s best-known creation, Rock Lottery, three years ago — featured Centro-matic’s Will Johnson playing his songs…
Barley House presents its annual Gramfest on November 5, a celebration of the life, music, and Nudie suits of former Byrd and Flying Burrito Brother Gram Parsons. Reed Easterwood, Meredith Miller, Lucky Pierres, the Bradfords, Ridgerunners, Shaggy and the Flamin’ Grammies, and Pat McKanna will perform Parsons’ music from 9…
Fiona Apple When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts… (Clean Slate/Epic Records) Fiona Apple sure doesn’t make it easy to like her. She’s got a dead man’s sense of humor (surely someone told her long ago that frowning makes ya look sexy), was singing her sour-dour love songs when she was…
LeAnn Rimes LeAnn Rimes (Curb Records) October 26, 1999: Perhaps stung by the criticism that her “Purple Rain” cover on last year’s presumptuously titled Sittin’ on Top of the World made her sound like an aging and incoherent drag queen, LeAnn Rimes releases an album of country standards. (Among the…
Don Byron The 40-year-old clarinetist would no doubt hate such a description, but Don Byron’s new album, Romance With the Unseen, is far and away his most, ah, normal disc to date — normal, meaning accessible; normal, meaning familiar. It’s hardly a knock — the record is a thing of…
Momus San Franciscan Noah Brill is 3 years old and famous. In a way. Last year, British Bach-obsessed and dirty-minded pop auteur Momus released his third album, The Little Red Songbook, which featured a song titled “Walter Carlos,” meant as a tribute to the ’60s Switched on Bach pioneer. Carlos,…
When it comes to rumors involving John Freeman, just assume it’s true until you hear otherwise. Usually, no matter how strange or inexplicable it appears to be, any story that includes his name doesn’t need to be checked out very thoroughly. By now, hearing that he has landed a gig…
Steve Dirkx’s Beatles in a Blender project is pretty much just what the name implied, or as close as the law and modern technology would allow. Last August, while learning how to use his recently purchased sampling equipment, the former Telefones bassist liberally cut and pasted his way through the…
Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios will host its second annual chili cook-off on October 30, an all-day bash featuring many pots of Denton’s finest chili (well…) and a ton (give or take a few pounds) of bands, including The Baptist Generals, Jetscreamer, Little Grizzly, Mandarin, Stumptone, Coals to Newcastle, Union Camp,…
The rumors began making the rounds late Wednesday; they were the kind of whispers that lead to screams. And unfortunately, they were all true: Tripping Daisy guitarist Wes Berggren died Wednesday evening at his Dallas home. No cause of death had been confirmed by Thursday afternoon. According to the police…
It is late August, less than a month before his band The Promise Ring is set to release its third album, Very Emergency, and guitarist Jason Gnewikow is doing his best to remain calm. Not surprising considering the disc’s impending arrival and all of the anticipation surrounding it, all of…
Best-of lists — which have filled the pages of newspapers and magazines ever since the calendar read January 2, 1999 — probably shouldn’t exist at all. They are, more than anything else, the stuff of fiction. Surely, there is one album out there, or 100, we’ve not heard — that…
By now, the members of Ghetto Fame-Us thought that they’d be putting the finishing touches on their second album, taking care of all the details that crop up between the recording sessions and the CD-release party. And that’s what they are doing now, except they haven’t graduated to their sophomore…
Foo Fighters There Is Nothing Left to Lose (Roswell/RCA) It’s not hard to imagine that Dave Grohl was happiest recording the Foo Fighters’ self-titled 1995 debut, if only because he was allowed to do almost everything himself. Two albums later, he’s still trying to do it all, or at least…
Kevin Deal Honky Tonks-N-Churches (Blind Nello Records) Kevin Deal has already supplied the only thing that really needs to be said about his follow-up to last year’s debut, Lovin’ Shootin’ Cryin’ and Dyin’; the title of the disc tidily sums up the songs contained on it, from the “blessed old…
Robbie Williams So sad they had to move this show from the Bronco Bowl to Deep Ellum Live — sad, but not surprising, since the hype landed with the thud of a corpse chucked from a 100-story window. And it’s sad only when you consider how much Capitol spent promoting…
Cibo Matto There are two kinds of bands: those made up of smart, serious musicians, and those who are strictly performers. The former usually don’t make for the most energetic live acts (read: lethargic shoegazers), while the latter often lack substance, substituting staged theatrics for musicianship (i.e., anyone who employs…
The Gloria Record, Antarctica Almost two years down the line, The Gloria Record is still having trouble convincing audiences it’s not merely a diluted version of Mineral, the Austin band singer-guitarist Chris Simpson and bassist Jeremy Gomez used to be in that had more fans visit its grave than attended…
We’ve long suspected that Christina Rees was “the enemy within,” but it wasn’t until Neva Chonin, a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, took Rees to task for her essay on women musicians (“Girl trouble,” September 30) that we had proof. Only after reading Chonin’s shoddy diatribe about Rees’ piece…
The Darlingtons (or Darlington, if you’re nasty) will be recording a live album on October 23 at Laser Trax in Arlington. The band — singer-guitarist Christy Darlington, drummer Steve Visneau, and someone on bass — is also working on demos for its next studio record, set to be released on…
It was the most unlikely reunion — and, perhaps, a most empty one, since it would lead to absolutely nothing at all except more hard feelings, more regret, and more pain. There they were only last April at the San Francisco Film Festival, sitting together for the first time since…
