Reed Easterwood woke one morning last fall to a vision: A colossal gold angel–wreath in one hand, staff in the other–spreading her wings over a Romanesque structure wrapped in white cloth. Easterwood was the guitarist on the MC 900 Ft. Jesus tour that had arrived in Berlin the weekend of…
Face it: No matter how many pages the itty-bitty booklets have–or how many flaps, fold-outs, and pockets full of the star’s bad art and even worse handwriting a box sports–CD packaging will never hold a candle to the heyday of album graphics; the Age of Vinyl, when dinosaurs walked the…
Her cappuccino grows cold, the foam stiffening in the cool ocean breeze. Her face hardens, too, her ever-present smile straightening into an uneasy line. Sam Phillips is having lunch in Santa Monica, sitting on the nasty, sunny shores of the Pacific, to talk about her new album, Omnipop, a rich…
Before–and after–swine No Code Pearl Jam Epic Records Pearl Jam’s rep lies with two songs off its unbearable 1991 debut–marketed as “hard rock” till “alternative” came to mean “alternative to good music,” which then fit the Jam like torn flannel and made them millionaires. One is “Jeremy,” about an alienated…
To the moon, Alice Archaeologists likely will conclude that music once was illegal when each time they unearth the home of an independent musician they discover boxes of unopened self-produced CDs stashed in the closet. That is exactly where the Primitive Radio Gods album Rocket and its hit, “Standing Outside…
Two blue Four Tens Strike Again Bugs Henderson and the Shuffle Kings Flat Canyon Records Got My Mind Back Smokin’ Joe Kubek Band featuring B’nois King Bullseye Blues Lead Guitar Player–in the heroic, capitalized sense of blues-boogie–is a tough slot. For a role model, LGPs should ignore names like Satriani…
The heart of the country Interstate City Dave Alvin and the Guilty Men Hightone Records Dave Alvin manages a neat feat here, producing a live album (recorded in Austin at the Continental Club this June) with backing band the Guilty Men that is unique enough to avoid boring those familiar…
If you drive northwest on U.S. 84 long enough you’ll hit the cap rock, an elevated expanse that sits several hundred feet above the land to the south. The lookout from the plateau is striking: the vastness below and the flat expanse behind, juxtaposed beneath a sky so huge that…
Australian for ‘pop’ If Angie Hart sang any more angelically, you would expect her band to include John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, and Jimi Hendrix. Like Sinead O’Connor, the vocalist for Australia’s Frente possesses pipes that don’t need to scream to be heard. When she sings in her childlike soprano about…
“The Starck Club?!” the guy next to me ejaculated from his barstool. “Man, everybody was on X all the time and doin’ big lines offa tabletops! They had all this gauzy shit or sumpin’ hanging from the ceiling there, and people would just be fuckin’ in the corners! No shit!…
Britt Daniel, the brainchild behind the Austin band Spoon, is a rather serious young man. That becomes obvious when he reminds this interviewer that I reviewed a tape by one of his previous bands. “You gave us a bad review,” he says, fixing his pale blue eyes upon me. “Did…
By Zac Crain The more things change… Sideways Limbo Cafe Ghostlight Records It’s great when a band experiments with the standard guitar-bass-drums approach to rock; even better when it’s more than listen-able. While Limbo Cafe’s latest offering succeeds at subverting the traditional arrangement (violin and tribal percussion figure prominently), the…
An odd assortment of street-corner punks and suburban kids in suits and skinny ties were on hand at Emo’s Alternative Lounge last Saturday night two weeks ago to pay tribute and say goodbye to Denton ska band the Grown-Ups. The crowd reflected the revival of ska music in its latest…
Standing on the steppes There are words that are inherently silly simply because of the rhythm of their syllables. Limpopo is a pretty good candidate for one of them. Although familiar to most in a more equatorial setting–the name of the river in Africa where the Elephant’s Child got his…
Spot–the pop trio that blossomed from the scorched patch of earth once known as Mildred–is sneaking up on rock stardom with the philosophical ferocity of Thomas Aquinas and the childlike wonder of Opie Taylor. Or it would be if its much-ballyhooed joint deal with indie label Ardent and major Interscope…
Don’t fence me in TheitGirl Sleeper Arista Records When Sleeper’s debut album, Smart, came out last year, the band was lumped together with Elastica and Menswear under the banner of the New Wave of New Wave movement. Well, it wasn’t really a movement and–for Sleeper especially–it was a misnomer. While…
The late Andres Segovia–the artist who almost single-handedly popularized classical guitar as a concert instrument in the 20th century–had only a few favorite guitarists; Pepe Romero was one. You can hear Romero, the man the master listened to, Thursday, August 29, at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s opening-night gala concert at…
Two kinds of flow The Fun of Watching Fireworks American Analog Set Emperor Jones/Trance Syndicate The term “space” is rapidly approaching overexposure, as is the genre (already the suspicion grows that it’s becoming a refuge for those who can’t really play, at least not fast). It’s tempting to declare the…
The freshness test open rubberbullet Last Beat Records Welcome to the modern world, rubberbullet version: a crashing, dissonant place where things either happen so fast that they’re past before perceived or they grind along glacially, with no change discerned. Open would be a fitting soundtrack for an angry traffic jam…
Signs that Leroy Shakespeare probably didn’t grow up in Lakewood and go on to attend Woodrow Wilson High School are hanging all around his new house, just off Lower Greenville. Literally: a number of rugs, mats, and/or drapes depend from the ceiling, partitioning the rooms and lending the space an…
Since its inception, Lollapalooza has relied on clashing genres: Perry Farrell and Ice-T pairing on Sly and the Family Stone’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey”; Courtney Love and Sinead O’Connor bonding over diapers backstage; or Ice Cube getting 20,000 rednecks to like him. Few stories, however, illustrate the dichotomy of…
In the United States, a country where b-boy cool has become de rigueur in white suburbia and psychedelic punks the Butthole Surfers have seen their first taste of Top 10 success come from–of all things–a rap song, lines have blurred. Call it the lollapollution of America. Since 1991, when Perry…
