Music

Kinda an interesting weekend upon us, now that it’s the end of the day on Friday and all. While there’s a lot happening early next week, the weekend’s kinda dry as big, big shows go. Anyway, onto the show’s we already told you about… Tonight, there’s a big one (Of…

Noise is not for everybody. Some people hear a jackhammer on the street corner and promptly cover their ears; others hear a subsonic melody and random harmonic movement in the staccato repetition of mechanized machinery. “Industrial music” is the umbrella term used to describe artists who eschew acoustic or organic…

Chris Plavidal, lead singer for Stumptone, designed this week’s Poster of the Week. “The image is some kind of World War I propaganda poster,” he explains. “I found it on Google. I forget what I was searching for, but I found all these old, cool Soviet stamps that have strange,…

With Coldplay hitting town this week, we got to thinking about frontman Chris Martin and his wife, actress Gwyneth Paltrow. Given the success on both sides of that marriage, who really wears the pants? Come to think of it, who wears the pants in a lot of these musician-celebrity pairings?…

north of the dial On Halloween night, one of Denton’s finest strolled into Hailey’s Club. Bypassing the line of costumed clubgoers blocking traffic on Mulberry Street, the police officer approached the main bar. It was nearly midnight. DJ Nature of The Party was spinning records, and the house was packed…

Kevin Barnes has contemplated suicide. Two years ago, the frontman for indie-pop institution Of Montreal moved to Norway with his wife to raise their newborn daughter, Alabee. The weather was shitty, he was living apart from his family and friends in a strange country, and his new family suddenly forced…

In the days before they jumped the shark with Speedstick commercials and their God-awful acting skills, Red and Meth were rappers. Real rhyme slingers too, who flipped metaphors and dropped one-liners, told stories, got high and freestyled. But since? Um…. Meth’s 2004 album Tical 0: The Prequel was lackluster at…

Thanks to the brainy backpack-rap explosion they did as much as anyone to ignite, Digable Planets’ two studio albums no longer sound as ground-breaking as they once did. But they still sound pretty damn nice: If you haven’t dug into the luxurious soul-funk grooves on 1994’s Blowout Comb lately, do…

It’s difficult to consider this album from The Boom Boom Box as the five-piece’s debut—although, well, it is just that. Still, this self-titled, self-released, Stuart Sikes-produced disc doesn’t really sound like a band still trying to figure out what it’s doing, and the members of the band—Ean Parsons (of Pinkston),…

With his final works, the American Recordings series, Johnny Cash had some of his biggest commercial and critical success, setting the bar ridiculously high for departed country singers. On Waylon Forever, which is billed as the country outlaw’s final record, Jennings doesn’t come close to Cash—although the record does have…

The U.S. presidential election is over, but the campaign continues for rapper MURS, aka Nick Carter (no, not that one), as he vies for the presidency of hip-hop. The 10-year veteran of Los Angeles’s underground scene released his 13th album (counting those with projects such as Living Legends), MURS for…

It’s hard to associate the word “comeback” with an entertainer who’s often associated with being a cog in hip-hop’s “golden age.” But the term is fitting here; it’s been nine years since the release of Q-Tip’s first solo album Amplified, an album that saw the former Tribe Called Quest leader…

Yet another band moniker for a solo performer, Castanets is the nom de musique of Raymond Raposa, a San Diego singer-songwriter with a playfully warped approach to American roots music: Not quite country, not quite folk, and not quite blues or gospel, Castanets weaves aspects of each into a haunted,…

Earlier this year, when the first song Fight Bite ever recorded—the lush, heartbreakingly beautiful ballad “Swissex Lover”—ended up on influential blogger Chris Cantalini’s Dallas-based Gorilla vs. Bear blog, the Denton/Dallas-based duo didn’t think much of it. Even a couple weeks later, when the ambient electronic duo, which is arguably the…

Making albums used to be pretty simple in the “golden age” of the music biz—at least in theory. Get your record label to pony up at least a hundred grand, rent out a famed studio and then watch as the music hits the stores and your royalties climb. The music…