Slaid Cleaves has a soft voice: not mumbled or insecure, just diminished. More than five years of living in Texas has diluted his childhood’s Maine inflections, but apparently has not lent him the trumpet-like blare that comes so easy to denizens of the Lone Star State. Cleaves–now an Austin-based singer-songwriter…
Function and form Swinging and Singing Johnny Reno Menthol Records Too often in pop, format counts for more than intention or even execution, and we’re left feeling vaguely suspicious of Andy Timmons playing the blues with the Pawn Kings (his hair is long and blond; he never picked cotton) or…
I wandered around the Dallas music scene lonely as a freelance cloud, the Dallas Observer Music Awards were about as interesting to me as a medium-sized rock in a coffee can. Who cares what anybody else thinks? Ah, the carefree ways of callow youth. Now that I’m the Observer music…
Don’t believe the hype Critics have taken two sharply different tacks when it comes to reviewing the new U2 album, Pop. While most of the larger, mainstream publications are hailing it as an innovative breakthrough, many of the smaller, more savvy mags are decrying it as the voice of a…
Heavy tin foil Come On Feel The Metal Various artists steve records The joke’s an easy one to remember, but a hard one to tell. Come On Feel The Metal, on which almost three dozen local bands go metal in all its incarnations (from Zep to ZZ Top to pop),…
Nobody’s looking past this one gig, but the late, lamented Cartwrights–a virtual family tree of local bands past comprising Barry Kooda (Nervebreakers, Yeah Yeah Yeah), Alan Wooley (Killbilly), Kim Herriage (Feet First), Donny Ray Ford, and Richie Vasquez–will reassemble to open for the Skeletons’ Hightone Record-label release party at the…
Misery as its own reward There is something about the allure of romantic despair. On her latest album, Excerpts from a Love Circus, Lisa Germano wallows in it, yet she seems reluctant to crawl to the shore. Listening to her songs makes you wonder how she can drag herself out…
Willful obscurity Straightaways Son Volt Warner Brothers Records “No one here says what they mean,” Jay Farrar sings on Straightaways, the latest offering from Son Volt. That line is accurate, the title ironic, since this album is a triumph of indirect transmission, implied feeling, and mumbled delivery unmatched since REM’s…
Ever since the guitar filibuster got elevated to sacrament, blues fans who love great singing and concise songs have been screwed. To their rescue come the Holmes Brothers–Wendell and Sherman Holmes on guitar and bass respectively, and Popsy Dixon on drums. The Promised Land, their newest album and fourth release…
“Other people had hits with her songs” was the sentence just beneath the headline in USA Today that announced musician Laura Nyro had died. She succumbed to ovarian cancer at the age of 49. This was the most depressingly predictable of epitaphs for Nyro, whose flirtation with media celebrity flared…
When the Dallas Observer ran a preview a few weeks ago announcing an upcoming Monte Warden show, said preview mentioned that Warden–like our own Colin Boyd–seemed to be haunted by the ghost of a certain bespectacled pop genius named Buddy. It was a nice bit of affirmation, then, when Boyd…
Service with a smile Satellitely Quickserv Johnny Rainmaker Records Quickserv Johnny, to paraphrase the Tom Hanks character in That Thing You Do, is the latest star in the Rainmaker Records galaxy–blasting through the same platinum-filled universe as Deep Blue Something. QJ has already been introduced to statewide radio audiences through…
For much of the ’90s, rock ‘n’ roll scenesters–from Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson to Alex Chilton and Peter Buck–have moved to New Orleans, drawn as much by the city’s Flowers of Evil darkness and spirit of perpetual carnival as by its musical heritage. It’s interesting, then, that Cowboy Mouth,…
Thinking man’s headbangers Aftertaste Helmet Interscope Records Helmet has long been promising to inject hard rock with new life: A combo led by a jazz guitarist who plays tight, economical, and subtly brutal metallic rock looks great on paper, and the underlying intelligence is another feather in leader Page Hamilton’s…
Even if the competition is not exactly fierce, to be nominated in the Dallas Observer’s “Best Rap/Hip-Hop” category two years in a row is no small feat. Denton’s Bassx walked away winners in 1995; in 1996, prior to the ballot counting, the band packed it up and moved to New…
Honky-tonk hero If you’re one of those folks who’s just a-brim with good intentions as far as live music goes, yet always ends up feeling bad when you don’t quite make it out to see show X or Y (especially when listening to everybody rave about it the next day),…
Running around Deep Ellum frantically on this cold and drizzly morning, Gordo “Buzz” Gibson (aka Michael Gibson) is a poster child for all that is unresolved. He’s been up all night, working on final mixes for his band’s soon-to-be-released debut album, but he’s just shy of finishing. He’s got record…
Jump for joy Before the term “guitar hero” existed, Guitar Shorty was one. His ear-reaming tones were a known influence on Jimi Hendrix, who may have lent an eye to Shorty’s showmanship as well. Born in Houston, Shorty took up music in Florida; in Louisiana he opened shows for Guitar…
Entrepreneur Mark Begelman–the man who answered the question “I wonder what a 75-foot-high stack of calculators looks like?” when he was in charge of Office Depot–has taken his pallet-intensive retail philosophy and applied it to MARS, which is now to be known as the Musicians’ Planet. Planets are usually quite…
Look upon my works King of the World Horseshoe Hiccup Records In this age of calculated maneuver, it’s nice to occasionally see something like creativity unhinged, like Tom Hulce’s Mozart in Amadeus. Houstonians Scott Daniels, Greg Wood, and Eddie Hawkins are vets of late and largely unlamented bayou city bands…
“Dedicated to all people who feel obliged to space,” reads the note on the original sleeve of Tangerine Dream’s Alpha Centauri, made in 1971. A quarter of a century later, four young metroplex musicians have taken this statement to heart, creating an album steeped in the spirit of German cosmic…
American Gothic Mirador Tarnation Reprise Records You can picture Tarnation singer Paula Frazer’s living room: a tattered Patsy Cline biography on the coffee table next to a Faulkner novel, a Johnny Guitar movie poster on the wall, a video of For a Few Dollars More playing with the sound turned…
