Austin’s The Gougers Offer Latest CD for Free

Austin’s The Gougers go the Radiohead route. (Traci Gourdie) Just a few weeks before the band hits the stage at the Granada, alt-country combo The Gougers is making its nifty latest release, A Long Day for the Weathervane, available for free via the Web site feegougers.com. The Austin quartet released…

The Ever-Prolific Pikahsso Pens An Obama Anthem

Maybe PPT’s break-up wasn’t as dramatic as we thought. Or maybe Pikahsso’s just a machine. Somehow, in the wake of the local hip-hop act PPT’s split, at least one member of the trio, Pikahsso, has refused to slow down. He’s already penned a track called “Vote For Obama (Yes We…

Damn Bloody Shame: Red Blood Club To Close

Ten days left. The people behind Red Blood Club have made it official: The Deep Ellum venue will close its doors for good on June 15. In a blog post put up today on the club’s Myspace page, co-owners Brad Garrett and April Collmar explain that they just couldn’t afford…

Bonus MP3: I Love Math — “Volcanic Ash”

You’ll see Darryl Smyers’ review of I Love Math’s new disc, Getting to the Point Is Beside It in this week’s print edition of DC9. And in it, you’ll see how Darryl can’t resist bringing up Philip Peeples’ tie-in as the drummer for both I Love Math and for the…

Tahiti Talks PPT’s Break-up…And Reality TV?

We caught up with Tahiti, the “T” in the recently split Dallas hip-hop group PPT, to get his version of the events that led to the breakup and to talk about his future as a musician. His take on the cause of the breakup isn’t significantly different than Pikahsso’s and…

Be Thankful This Air Guitar Tour Is Skipping Dallas

The 2008 United States Air Guitar Championships Tour has announced which cities will host its competitions this year and, thankfully, Dallas is not on the list. The tour kicked off yesterday in New York and the closest this geek fest will get to Dallas is Austin in July. The finals…

Junior Circuit

In a bizarro world, in the Dallas of an alternate, and perhaps better, universe, The Lash Outs’ “The Kids Don’t Wanna Dance” is the city’s breakout hit of the summer. A bouncy track that’s catchy enough to latch on in its own right and through its own merit, the song…

North of the Dial

George Neal likes the characters in his songs to suffer. Chalk it up to a streak of aesthetic sadism if you will, but for the better part of the last two decades, it’s a tendency that has allowed Neal to produce some of Denton’s most compelling and underappreciated song craft…

Ain’t No Mountain High

There are 11 of them. Well, not right now, actually. At this very moment, only nine of Mount Righteous’ members have gathered in the driveway of bass drum player Joey Kendall’s house in Grapevine. (That, in and of itself, is something of an accomplishment.) The two missing members of the…

Cord Changes

When Helio Sequence performs live, it’s hard to believe sometimes that it’s only two people making all that noise. Especially now. Now, vocalist/guitarist Brandon Summers’ vocals, solid and strong, bear no sign of the fact that, for a long stretch during the four years between 2004’s Love and Distance and…

Swinging States

Being married to your bandmate isn’t easy. Just ask Jason Hammel, half of the twosome that makes up indie pop act Mates of State. “I honestly don’t know how people avoid getting sick of each other,” says Hammel, who has been hitched to singer/keyboardist Kori Gardner for almost a decade…

Shearwater

It’s not exactly surprising that Shearwater vocalist Jonathan Meiburg moonlights as an ornithologist—after all, he thanks four birds by scientific name in the liner notes of Rook, the band’s fifth full-length (also named for a bird and sporting a spooky, Hitchcock-inspired cover). Expanding the sonic palette employed on 2006’s stellar…

Fleet Foxes

On first listen to Fleet Foxes’ debut, it’s easy to think, “How in the world did Sub Pop manage to dig up another band that sounds even more like My Morning Jacket than Band of Horses does?” Repeat listens reveal these Foxes to be of a much folksier pedigree, however,…

I Love Math

These days, it’s nearly impossible not to see, hear or read about Old 97’s. Rhett Miller and crew have just released Blame It on Gravity, supposedly a return to form while bassist Murry Hammond’s solo debut turned out to be a very pleasant surprise, an acoustic, country gospel record full…

Daniel Folmer

Daniel Folmer may have come onto the scene in 2006 as a wide-eyed wunderkind, but with 2007’s Gloria, and now A Leaf, he’s starting to carry himself like a sage observer of the human condition. Folmer’s earnest-yet-slightly-cynical balladry continues to mature, occasionally veering into Rufus Wainwright territory, but forgoing Wainwright’s…

El Madmo

The frolicking, rollicking threesome—Maddie on guitar and vocals; El on bass and vocals; Mo on drums and ‘fro—made its bow on December 22, 2004, at a Manhattan rocketeria; the band was the opening act for BeavHer ’80s Dance Party, heh. Then came a 10-song demo in ’05 (or not, details…

The Cure, 65daysofstatic

Thanks to an endless flood of import singles, live albums and re-releases, it’s hard to believe that The Cure’s next album, which is due in September, is only the gloom-rockers 13th full-length effort. Maybe that’s ’cause when The Cure does release a disc, Robert Smith and Co. want to make…

Dax Riggs, John Barrett’s Bass Drum of Death

Oxford, Mississippi’s John Barrett has one-upped The Black Keys and The White Stripes by stripping his blues-garage rock band down to a single member. Or is that one-downed? Either way, in Barrett’s case, the rudimentary percussion complements his rawboned songs. He sings and plays grimy blues licks along with whatever…