Music

If you’d asked two years ago, I would have said that the only reason for a cover band to exist is to make money and watch the crazy shit that goes down at weddings, and that’s coming from someone who’s been in one. Yeah, I admit it—the Ronnie Dobbs Band…

It’s hard to believe that anyone, let alone a member of the Foo Fighters, takes the Grammy Awards seriously. But bassist Nate Mendel says he’s honored that his band has been nominated. And he’ll be damned if Kanye West wins Album of the Year. At the 50th Annual Grammy Awards…

From Texas to Canada, even from beyond the grave, traditional country music endures across decades, borders and genre reclassifications. These four releases went sadly unnoticed in 2007. Here’s hoping that the new year will bring them some overdue recognition. Gram Parsons called what he did “Cosmic American Music,” and when…

Even though he recorded most of the songs in 2006, Dallas’ own John Sprengler, the one-man band behind the name It is Well, keeps remixing and adding new songs to this debut EP, basically reissuing it at his discretion, usually whenever a performance is on the horizon. Since Sprengler hit…

It’s been more than a decade since Maggie, Terre and Suzzy Roche released a new album together, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to Moonswept. The sisters’ distinctive harmonies still lock together so precisely that a younger listener might naturally assume them to be a result of technology as…

Although the name induces thoughts of hardcore porn of the anal variety, Back Door Slam are actually the newest in a long line of British boys infatuated with the blues. Consisting of teenagers Davy Knowles, Ross Doyle and Adam Jones, the band’s 2007 debut, Roll Away, has drawn quite a…

Though some believe Chicago’s Lupe Fiasco is too smart for mainstream rap, that’s not exactly true. Most of the lyrics on sophomore release Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool are pretty basic, clichéd stuff, right down to the CD’s opening monologue: “They thought it was cool to tear down the projects and…

Fort Worth’s Catfish Whiskey has been around since 2003 but did not start recording the band’s studio debut, Blood & Bones, until last year. Honing their swampy mix of blues and psychedelic-tinged country during the interim, Keegan McInroe and the rest of this quartet are now ready for, and deserving…

It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to go to an all-day, all-night rock festival in Deep Ellum or Exposition Park. I’m sorry to admit that a few awful lineups were all it took for me to develop something of an allergy to them. The teenage me would have…

Outside the House of Blues. (Jonathan Finley)Went to see American Werewolf Academy, the King Bucks, The Backsliders and Boys Named Sue Saturday at Dan Aykroyd’s shrine to commerce and “blues” and I gotta tell ya: It was an experience in vittles, incense and two totally different sound guys. As far…

A pair of aged hippies sit on a couch. One says, “If you could be any Bob Dylan you wanted to, which Bob Dylan would you be?” Our answer: Dewey Cox. The New Yorker cartoon was probably meant to conjure Todd Haynes’ kaleidoscopic, sort-of biopic I’m Not There, but intriguing…

Admit it: Sometimes you’re sitting around listening to your old Sex Pistols records and thinking, “I wonder which punk-rock icon has the biggest schlong?” Or maybe you’re wondering, “What kind of pizza would that one Food Network dude say goes well with the New York Dolls?” The Official Punk Rock…

A producer, beat maker, video artist, songwriter and performance artist from Olympia, Washington, Nicky Click is also a petulant bitch. But that’s probably exactly how she wants it. I’m on My Cell Phone, her sophomore effort, is an imaginative hodgepodge of minimalist hip-hop and urban folk that doesn’t sound like…