Music

This week’s featured poster, designed by Gavin Mulloy, is for the Saturday Double-Wide show featuring Cocky Americans, The Southern Sea and Elkhart. I like how the language on the poster comes off as robotic and stilted, like “five dollar entrance fee” and especially “Three bands that rock your simple human…

Seemingly out of nowhere, a local release showed up on my desk last week. Normally, this kind of thing doesn’t result in a great deal of enjoyment. But in the case of a sextet known as Most, the pleasure factor proved to be exceedingly high. The Denton band’s debut EP,…

After thumbing through one of his 30 or so milk crates of vinyl records, Jonathan Graham slips one of the discs out, slides the jet-black vinyl record free of its sleeve and pops it on his turntable. It doesn’t matter which record he chooses—Graham’s heard all the songs before. As…

If the three members of Denton’s PVC Street Gang didn’t tell you that they were in a band, chances are you would mistake them for out-of-work computer programmers and motley ones at that. “Well, I am currently out of work,” singer/guitarist Chris McGaha says with a chuckle. Bald, stout and…

Last summer, there seemed to be a folk-rock revival beginning to form on the musical landscape, with bands left and right being lauded for their folky, melodic harmonies. But while everyone was (rightfully) going gaga over Seattle’s Fleet Foxes and other likeminded acts, nobody seemed to notice—or even remember—Canada’s Great…

For 30 years now, Roscoe Beck has worked with Leonard Cohen. It started when Beck was 24, and his Austin group, Passenger, got a call to play on Cohen’s 1979 LP, Recent Songs, an album that marked a return to the Old World folk that gave Cohen’s early records their…

No Western Wear cowboy, Chris Knight earned his country backwoods bona fides working as a mine reclamation inspector and living in a trailer on 90 acres in Western Kentucky. And his frighteningly honest, no-frills style matches early inspirations John Prine and Steve Earle, finding a home somewhere between country, folk…

It seems either impossible or super-difficult to simultaneously look backward and move forward. But eccentric underground pop legend Robyn Hitchcock has been remarkably productive in the 21st century, releasing both quality career retrospectives and new albums that glow with inspired energy. Hitchcock’s latest LP, Goodnight Oslo, finds the gracefully white-haired…

The new Yeah Yeah Yeahs CD shares its name with the legendary London nightclub that served as a way station between ’70s punk and ’80s synth-pop. Like the club, the record doesn’t straddle eras so much as create a temporary universe where one style solidifies as the next takes shape…

The properly named debut release from this local punk trio opens on a promising kick: There’s no musical lead-in, no build-up, just an immediate and crushing launch into the opening track “Trouble Is,” as the vocals, bass, guitar and drums all start simultaneously and hit the listener like a sharp…

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Things are changing down in Deep Ellum. Oh, you have heard that? Well, bear with me anyway. Because as we inch closer to the proposed September opening dates of the new train stations that will connect Deep Ellum and Exposition Park to the…

It was 32 years ago today that Led Zeppelin opened its 1977 North American tour in Dallas. I was 14 years old at the time, a student at Westwood Jr. High School, and Led Zep was the most important thing in my life. I knew how to play all of…