Quirky, man, quirky Merkin Wig Riddle Me This Doilie Records Smirk The Sutcliffes Skiffle Beat Records Ambling through a smorgasbord of distinct sounds can be as dangerous as trying to inject a little humor into your music. Overplay your hand in the former case and you come off as unimaginative;…
It’s a Thursday night at Grinder’s and of course it’s humid out on the java joint’s patio, where a pair of young fellas perform music in the back. One does most of the singing; the other strums an acoustic guitar and sings backup. Some of their admitted inspirations are obvious,…
Elements of style Melting in the Dark Steve Wynn Zero Hour Records Beautiful Freak Eels Dreamworks Records Sometimes you gotta shake things up–have Frosted Flakes instead of Grape-Nuts; it’s a rule that Steve Wynn–known for his early-’80s stint with the Dream Syndicate and more recently Gutterball–knows well: He relocated to…
Do you want to know a secret? I’ve had it up to about here with the Beatles. It’s been more than six months, and the foofaraw surrounding the 35th anniversary of the Fab Four shows no signs of abating. First, I get a chance to buy–for a paltry 160 bucks–the…
When we ran an item taking Sting to task for his ware-peddling at his recent Starplex show, we were unaware that the deeply thoughtful Brit was battling a terrible condition: Rodin’s syndrome, or manual-cephalic adhesion–the recurrent sticking of the hand to the head. As these pictures illustrate, the brave bass…
Dream catchers all Sweets for Slumber The Dreamcatchers CSP Records Things That Show Kris McKay Shanacie Records Perception can be altered by exposure, which is how classic soul–thought the coolest back in the punk era, when it was relatively underappreciated–became so tiresome once ascendant. If you have a roommate who…
The pain of losing a friend is never easy, but it becomes infinitely harder when that loss is a result of a conscious decision. The suicide of Mark Migliore, a successful engineer and investor who used his money to document the psychedelic music scene through his Rockadelic Records, has left…
Low-down, dirty future techno blues Subliminal Sandwich, Meat Beat Manifesto’s latest, is a magnum opus of post-rave electronica. Mastermind Jack Dangers unleashes the possibilities of sampling and sound manipulation to produce a chilling soundtrack for the approaching end-of-the-millennium paranoia. Dub bass riffs collide with electronic beats in the midst of…
It is early on a Friday night and Club Clearview is almost full. A large crowd–dressed mostly in black–defies the unwritten rock rule: Thou shalt not hang around while the opening band is playing. Several hundred eyes are fixed on the stage, where a group of young people fills the…
Letter from home Martin Zellar and the Hardways Martin Zellar and the Hardways Rykodisc A singer-songwriter on stage is very much like a boxer in the ring, except that there’s more than one opponent: You’re up against everybody else in the arena. You can try to subdue with naked honesty,…
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…
