Soul power The CD booklet accompanying Digable Planets’ late 1994 release, Blowout Comb, reads almost like a pamphlet you might be handed at a political rally, each page covered in messages and symbols and slogans. A prisoner from the California state penitentiary sends his “message from the belly” (as in,…
There’s a moment on Laurie Anderson’s most recent album, last year’s portentous and unnerving Bright Red, when her velvety sage’s voice breaks out of its cool, ironic mode and challenges the very universe. In “Love Among the Sailors,” a funereal piece about the devastation of AIDS, Anderson declares: “If this…
Flak racket rubberbullet rubberbullet Last Beat Records Once one of my favorite local bands because they were so weird–a rock band that splintered off into oddball free-jazz jam, a hard-core guitar band fronted by Earl Harvin’s funky drumming–they are now one of my favorite local bands because they’ve become so…
Diamond Dave, Shinola Sam Balance Van Halen Warner Bros. Records If the first incarnation of Van Halen made music for the crystal meth generation, then Van Hagar does it for the Crystal Pepsi Generation. With each record since the departure of Diamond David Lee Roth, Eddie’s band has become less…
AUSTIN–The man standing at the counter waiting to order his food is disheveled, slumped, looking slightly deranged. His beard chopped and trimmed in odd proportions, his matted and tangled and unwashed hair sticking up in various spots, his voice an uncomfortably loud squawk, Roky Erickson looks and sounds like any…
Take out the trash, Pantera Almost since its inception, the Basement was known as the home to Pantera: the band members hung out there as though it was a second home, and the hard-rock club was used as a backdrop in three videos. So as the Basement (and On the…
In the end, the members of the Nightcaps weren’t just seeking money when they picked their legal fight with ZZ Top. They wanted some respect, some credit–someone to acknowledge that 20 years ago, ZZ Top stole their one small claim to Texas music fame. But on January 12, the Texas…
Rock-a-silly Without the Cramps, Jim Heath might still be playing in blues bands, and without the Cramps, Ronnie Dawson might still be languishing in unwarranted obscurity. Yes, the Cramps, the band that has managed to exist for more than 16 years on a steady diet of trash, novelty, and rockabilly…
Dreading Rita The Marley Family Album Various artists Heartbeat Records Allegedly a celebration of Bob Marley’s 50th birthday, this immediate and extended-family album does more to reinforce the perception that when Marley died May 11, 1981, so, too, did the music he briefly made internationally popular. Opening with “I Know”…
Since the dawn of time–or at least since Pat Boone took the tutti out of Little Richard’s frutti and went to the top of the pops–white musicians have gotten rich and famous off the innovation of their black counterparts. No startling revelation here: the whiter the musician, the brighter the…
AUSTIN–The Trance Syndicate office–if one can call a tiny room in a wretched little business park no bigger than its neighboring car wash an office–is a wreck. Random sheets of paper, discarded memos, old copies of the Austin Chronicle, publicity photos, and other pieces of errata and dumped trash cover…
When the song comes out of the speakers, for the first time or the 500th, it seems almost too perfect: Johnny Cash, his voice a beautifully rotten croak that falls somewhere between singing and speaking, tells of the monster trapped within him–the monster that makes him who he is, a…
Music does not, of course, mean the same thing to all people. To some, it implies the sweet sounds of acoustic guitars and confessional lyrics or the strains of violins or the foreign rhythms of Africa or the Middle East; to others, the term conjures the blaring catharsis of amplified…
No practice makes perfect As far as big-name lineups go, Buccinator is a little like going to the NBA All-Star Game and finding CBA players on the floor. Drummer Avery Smith doubles as the Beastie Boys’ touring percussionist; Dave Gomez used to play bass in Oiler (with Buccinator “noise guitarist”…
Heavy metal, its proponents and detractors have long maintained, is a music created by and for an audience of disenfranchised young white boys. They are the long-haired, ripped-jean, Ozzy-loving, pot-smoking, Camaro-driving kids who hang out on the smoking porch after lunch; the frustrated 13-year-old who stands in front of his…
Hip hype hooray Second Coming The Stone Roses Geffen Records If one is to dismiss bands based upon hype alone, there are dozens of lesser, more popular bands worth ignoring; andif one is to loathe a band because of its arrogance (recorded a song called “I Want to be Adored,”…
You could call it brilliant marketing or the biggest bonehead move of a young musician’s career, but either way, 19-year-old Brian Hedenberg, who fronts the band Glitter Freak, has found a way of garnering extra attention for his new local compilation CD Angels on Horseback. And it’s only going to…
Same as the old blues Live at the Grand Emporium Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets featuring Sam Myers Black Top Records Inevitably, to get it right for purists, modern bluesmen must make their music sound old, but somehow not dated; they must make it sound authentic, but somehow not derivative…
There was a time just a few years ago when Randy Erwin, once a young yodeling Texan outfitted in retro-cowboywear a handful of decades after the heydays of Bob Wills and Hank Williams, was considered something of a novelty. Folks around here eyed Erwin (born Skalicy, of Czech and Polish…
Schlub rock The tempered raves the Shakin’ Apostles have garnered since the release of their eponymous debut in 1993 throw out the Flamin’ Groovies and Moby Grape as the starting points of reference–and, just maybe, there’s a little of that dope-drenched ’60s SanFran boogie-rock to be found within the grooves…
Each time he approached some level of recognition outside his small realm of jazz musicians, James Clay retreated to Dallas–to his home, his family, a life he refused to sacrifice to fame or money. He was among the greatest jazz musicians ever to come from Texas, and yet when he…
Sitting at the bar, slumped over his beer with an unfiltered Camel smoldering between his fingers, Tom Morrell looks more than out of place. He looks out of time. In this Houston’s restaurant across the street from Prestonwood Mall, filled with suburbanites returning Christmas gifts, Morrell sticks out something fierce–his…
