The best record to arrive in the mail this year will not even hit stores until February 23, 1999: Sleater-Kinney’s The Hot Rock. It possesses what 99.93 percent of every single record released in 1998 does not–that intangible insinuation of hanging-on-by-a-thread desperation, the sound of everything falling apart, the sensation…
This story was to have been about only one thing: how the soundtrack to a marginal 1965 television special has become one of the best-selling holiday albums, one that grows more popular with each passing year. It was to have simply been a love letter to A Charlie Brown Christmas–a…
Life begins on the stage Transistor Blast XTC TVT Records God almighty, four discs of XTC live–two consisting of material recorded for British DJ John Peel’s show from 1979 to ’89, one of random live shows dating from 1978 and ’79, the last taken entirely from a December 1980 concert…
Redrumm Recordz’s Pikahsso never misses an opportunity to plug his label’s upcoming release schedule, steering every query back to the future. If you were to ask the 28-year-old rapper what day it is, he’d probably tell you Kabaal has an album coming out in a few weeks, followed by full-lengths…
Gone, daddy, gone Lo-Fi Lorraine & Her Bag of Tricks Slick 57 R Records I never really understood rockabilly’s inability to stay good and dead. One slap-bass, hillbilly-rock rave-up way too often sounds like the next, something even Carl Perkins figured out around the time he discovered he was a…
The Salesman and Bernadette, the sixth album Vic Chesnutt has put his name on, is as sexy as folk-pop gets. Far from the scratchy, aching, desperate tunes that characterized Chesnutt’s first records in the late ’80s–back when he was little more than an Athens, Georgia, cult hero celebrated and produced…
There are only a handful of rock critics whose careers have made them as much pop stars as the pop stars they write about: Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Legs McNeil, Robert Palmer, Jon Savage. Robert Christgau’s there too, but he’s the hey-I’m-just-a-fan-like-you of the bunch, a writer who doses his…
Gang of Four wrote protest music for people who didn’t think they had anything to protest. On the surface, the characters in their songs were the very definition of happy, satisfied folk: office workers, blithely ebullient clubgoers, people who were falling in love–or at least thinking they were. The band’s…
It seems now like a moment that never really existed, like a fantasy conjured by men and women who can only dream of such a time and place as Warner Bros. Records in the late 1960s and 1970s. Might as well have been forever ago, when Joni Mitchell and Jimi…
Wu-Tang for now Bobby Digital in Stereo The RZA Gee Street/V2 Tical 2000: Judgement Day Method Man Def Jam The Wu-Tang Clan’s 1993 debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), still stands as the best hip-hop album of the ’90s, an album so perfect, even its creators have yet to figure…
Greg Dulli was never supposed to be the lead singer in the Afghan Whigs. He was originally the drummer, the stringy-haired dude at the very back–you know, the guy you never notice, never remember when he’s replaced three records into the band’s career. Guitarist Rick McCollum and bassist John Curley…
Robert Brooks has been a devoted Dixie Chicks fan for six years, from the time he and his wife first saw them perform at an American Airlines company picnic at Sandy Lake Amusement Park. Since then, he has followed the band like a debt collector, doggedly tracking the Dixie Chicks’…
Sidneys unite! Sniffing Glue The Visitors Mind Control The Visitors ride (too?) hard on vocalist Benjie Bollox’s brief stint with the London-based U.K. Subs, a veteran punk band that outlived its purpose by 1981 yet refuses to lie down. Bollox spent about a year abroad drumming for the Subs before…
After almost eight years, four albums, and 646 shows, Jawbox broke up like so many bands do, quietly and abruptly. The members of Jawbox never had a chance to say goodbye. There wasn’t a swan-song single or farewell tour, not even a final, triumphant gig in its hometown of Washington,…
Lucinda Williams does not simply answer questions. She responds in monologue, rambling on minute after minute until the query almost seems like an afterthought. Perhaps this is because at this moment, she is rushing to get out the door and to the airport, where she will catch a plane to…
Kirking off Volume 1 Fear of Pop 550 Music/Sony Ben Folds’ low-fi-avant-pop-dance-etc. side project won’t much impress the faithful who adore Folds or sway the non-believers who find him a bit twee and insincere. It’s too slick for the basement-tapes crowd, too eclectic for the audience that considers Folds the…
George Gimarc has spent a lifetime collecting and cataloging and preserving rock and roll’s past–first as a radio-show host, then as an author of three books. The front room of his Garland home is the product of a life spent trolling record stores, diving into radio-station dumpsters, hoarding old tapes…
Sweet smell of excess Smell of Incense Southwest F.O.B. Sundazed Music Inc. They say history never forgets, which is scary indeed when you consider that sooner or later, every forgotten rock-and-roll nugget and turd will turn up on compact disc. Yesterday’s echoes are today’s digital treasures, or so the old…
Jewboyz II Men Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman Various artists Kinkajou Records Some day, Kinky Friedman will get his due. Kinky will see to that, appearing as he does on his own tribute record–the man’s nothing but chutzpah, bless him. Maybe history hasn’t done too well…
Hat’s off Never Look Back Brian Houser HEIRESS-aesthetic Music-scene regulars were whispering about Never Look Back, Brian Houser’s debut, long before the album was even finished. Houser, a regular at Adair’s when he’s not fixing Six Flags roller coasters, was the future of country music, they said, even though he…
Brother Russell Miles is 32 years old, and the only thing he does, day after day, is make prank phone calls. He has done this for years, since he was a child growing up in the suburbs of Dallas, making amateur comedy tapes with his older brother. The pair would…
The phone is no friend of Curt Kirkwood’s. Too often, the tidings it bears are foul. He calls them “incomings from Tempe.” They go like this: Your brother’s wife overdosed this morning; she’s dead. Your brother got busted again last night, and he told the cops he was you. Your…
