Music

Mike Snider’s got a nice little treat for music fans this evening at AllGood Cafe: A night with Jon Dee Graham, the Austin music legend who has played with just about every musician in Texas, was once a member of the True Believers with Alejandro Escovedo and was named the…

We’ve got quite a backlog of CDs we’ve never gotten around to, so we’re going to try to chip away at the pile with this regular feature. The plan: to take four or five at a time and play each CD for as long as I can stand it. Confusion…

Even by Nickelback standards, Dark Horse is ridiculously brazen, comically outsized and defiantly Bruckheimer-esque. The songs not explicitly about bonin’ chicks concern such subjects as romancin’ chicks (“I’d Come for You,” an unapologetic quote of Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There for You”), the dangers of doing (the wrong) drugs (“Just…

The Smoking Gun Web site exposed Akon earlier this year, unearthing police documents showing he’s greatly exaggerated his arrest record and incarceration time. And so on his third album, Freedom, he downgrades himself from Konvicted (his last CD’s title) to “Troublemaker.” Even this description refers more to his tendencies to…

Geography partly explains the power and appeal of blues belter and boogie-woogie piano banger Marcia Ball—but, again, only partly. Raised on the Texas border in the small Southwestern Louisiana town of Vinton, Ball discovered her own voice at ground zero of American roots music. Rockabilly, zydeco, country, R&B, swamp rock…

No one can accuse Dale Watson of not being country enough. The Austin-based singer-songwriter has a bottomless bar-room voice, a wonderfully baroque delivery, and a pronounced ornery streak he proudly displays on “Country My Ass,” in which he attacks watered-down C&W with the couplet “Force feed us that shit/Ain’t you…

A good five hours before his band was set to perform for the first time in four months, Fair to Midland frontman Darroh Sudderth awkwardly ambled about the empty pre-show confines of the Curtain Club early Saturday evening, doing his best to prepare for the night ahead. Mostly, though, his…

New Year’s Eve at Hailey’s got off to a slow start. Doors opened at 7 p.m., but naturally, people had to look their best and be fashionably late. Thus, the vast majority of people arrived between 11 p.m. and midnight. And when they did, it was as if several busloads…

It’s January, which means it’s that time of year again. No, we don’t mean it’s time to honor your New Year’s resolution to have more empathy for your fellow man or to stop putting so much stock in gossip and rumors. It’s time to lay odds on which musicians are…

There existed only one band from the late ’70s through the early ’80s: Foreigner. The group gave us immortal rock tunes such as “Cold as Ice,” “Feels Like the First Time” and “Urgent”—and who could forget “Waiting for a Girl Like You”? Now, the voice of Foreigner, Lou Gramm, is…

Sure, 2008 may be done, but the list-making still continues… This year, five contributors to the Dallas Observer’s music section were asked to participate in the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll, which compiles the lists of hundreds of music critics across the country into one massive, hopefully…

Sure, 2008 may be done, but the list-making still continues… This year, five contributors to the Dallas Observer’s music section were asked to participate in the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll, which compiles the lists of hundreds of music critics across the country into one massive, hopefully…

Sure, 2008 may be done, but the list-making still continues… This year, five contributors to the Dallas Observer’s music section were asked to participate in the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll, which compiles the lists of hundreds of music critics across the country into one massive, hopefully…

Hailing from Minneapolis, Off With Their Heads continues the impressive lineage of Twin Cities punk rock that began with Husker Du, Soul Asylum and The Replacements back in the ’80s. From the Bottom, the band’s most recent effort, is packed full of spite and bile, just as good punk record…

For more photos, album art and show posters, check out our slideshow here.Dallas bands are usually judged within the context of their efforts and accomplishments. Some spend stupid money on hair care products and aspire to a label deal; other bands actually rehearse and wanna make an important artistic statement…