Self DreamWorks could have released Self’s second full-length, this year’s Breakfast With Girls, right into the cutout bin; this nifty little record’s been greeted with as much fanfare as Christmas at an Orthodox rabbi’s house. Too bad too, since Breakfast is a rather satisfying, uh, late-night snack — precocious new-wave…
Ask The Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands which band has had the biggest impact on him and his music, and his answer begins before the question ends — New Order, he declares, no hesitation or hedging necessary. Actually, what he says is Norder, his response so quick that it catches his…
A friend of mine believes Tori Amos is some sort of cross between the Pied Piper and Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate. That is, she plants secret buzzwords in her songs that have been helping her recruit an enormous army of young women in their late teens and early…
Bruce Goldberg doesn’t have much time to talk. Every few minutes, the phone begins beeping incessantly, meaning someone on the other line is placing an order. And if the other line isn’t ringing, one of his six full-time employees is trying to get his attention so they can fill an…
David Dennard is doing God’s work — if your definition of God is, say, Johnny Cash or Carl Perkins or Gene Vincent. Come January, the man responsible for releasing collections celebrating the rare-and-unreleased work of such local heroes as Johnny Dollar and “Groovey” Joe Poovey will ship to stores what’s…
Bucks Burnett presents the latest, and last, installment of his Variety Nightmare series at Club Dada on September 29, featuring sets by The Glory Brothers — a duo featuring Paul Averitt (who plays with Burnett in The Volares) and Salim Nourallah (The Moon Festival) — and doublepluspop, which also includes…
Pete Townshendt Pete Townshend Live (Platinum Entertainment) Nothing against the aging rocker who turns it down and tones it down as he gets older, especially when that aging rocker is a half-deaf Pete Townshend. Better to stop the rock than keep forcing it; better to go acoustic when the electric…
Little Jack Melody and His Young Turks Noise and Smoke (Kilroy Records) Maybe Little Jack really does like to keep his Turks young: By his count, the artist known to his family as Steve Carter has burned through 19 full-timers plus “a dizzying assortment of occasional subs.” Sounds like Menudo…
Monte Montgomery There are not too many things in this world that impress me outside of sex acts and Johnny Cash’s pulse. But the first time I planted myself and watched singer-songwriter-guitarist Monte Montgomery perform, I was astonished. This man’s a true guitar genius, standing at the brink of six-string…
Charlie Daniels Band Believe it or not, there was once a time when Charlie Daniels actually seemed kind of hip. After all, he played on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album, and produced the sublime record Elephant Mountain by the Youngbloods. Then, in 1973, he scored a hit song with “Uneasy…
Solex It’s that old question about toy and mannequins and falling trees: Do they talk when no one is looking? Add record stores to that list; Elisabeth Esselink can make them sing well after closing time. The inventory is her instrument, and while as much has been said about any…
Hamell on Trial When a band leaves a major label, its first independent release is usually just the band trying poorly, very poorly, to imitate that major label production. Sure, it’s the same band, only now it doesn’t have any money, and no label rep is there to hold their…
Maybe it was inevitable that after years of playing sidekick to Kim Thayil’s Led Zeppelin 3-Sabbath Bloody Sabbath riffs, Chris Cornell would decide to turn it down his first time out as Solo Artist. Turn it way down too: Euphoria Morning gets so quiet that at times it sounds like…
Used to be Kim Lenz and her Jaguars, though I suppose when your music is as static as this all-novelty-all-the-time act, you gotta shake things up somewhere, so why not the name? The surging audience for this local act has more to do with citywide retro-love than true musicality, although…
Hibbing, Minnesota — Maybe this is what he meant by bringing it all back home. On Wednesday, Bob Dylan returned to the town where he spent his childhood, to the place where it all began for a young Robert Allen Zimmerman, to announce his retirement from popular music. “Oh, all…
It’s never too late for a comeback in rock and roll: Every has-been is one fluke hit away from being a still-is. Yet even with that in mind, They Might Be Giants is perhaps an unlikely candidate for a resurgence, although it might be too soon to term the group’s…
One of my favorite popular musical tales concerns the writing of “Okie From Muskogee,” a song that enmeshed its author, Merle Haggard, within a cultural and political misunderstanding that seems to have lifted only in the last decade or so. As the story goes, Hag and his band were traveling…
When Brett Tohlen and Matt Beaton say that their band Lewis has been luckier than most, they don’t mean to imply that the group hasn’t had to struggle. Far from it actually, since the first four years of Lewis’ existence were nothing but an uphill climb. After all, three-fourths of…
Jim Heath, better known as Reverend Horton Heat (or Frankie Ramada, if you’re nasty) is now officially in the record bidness. Heath debuted his new label, Fun-Guy Records, with a single featuring two new Horton Heat tunes, and apparently, it’s only the beginning. The disc — “King” on the A-side,…
Any band that borrowed its name from a bit of dialogue found in The Karate Kid’s climactic fight scene should be, by all rights, easy to define. It’s the kind of ironic moniker that would fit right in with the SoCal punk-pop crowd, one of those start-stop descendants of the…
It takes a while to get past the packaging of Andrew Bird’s second disc, Oh! The Grandeur, and by the time you do, well, the music can wait a little longer (it has already — for, like, 60 years). Not to slight the fine violin-and-vocals craftsmanship of one Mr. A…
Never quite understood why Calways frontman Todd Deatherage idolized Tom Petty so much. Why would someone with Deatherage’s voice and songwriting ability deify a man who has always sounded as though he’s singing out of Dylan’s nose while recycling the same Keith Richards-by-way-of-Roger McGuinn riff? Sure, it’s fine to marvel…
