To make their swinging parties even more happening, ’60s fetishists the Lollipop Shoppe came up with the perfect shiny accessory for their groovy thrift-store dresses and go-go boots: a compilation CD. Lollipop gal DJ TigerBee, aka The Shapes’ singer/bassist Patricia Rodriguez, recruited some of her favorite retro-rock acts—all Texan except…
After fumbling a few chords and forgetting more than a few words, a weary and weathered Kris Kristofferson paused briefly during his performance at a New West Records day party during SXSW 2006. He then humbly mumbled, “Just imagine this beautiful thing that sounds as good as Bob Dylan.” The…
White Ghost Shivers may sound like the house band at an old speakeasy, but they shred like a Brazilian speed-metal festival. Effortlessly leaping from western swing and bluegrass jazz stomps to calypso ballads and vaudevillian hamming, the Austin octet follows in the footsteps of fellow Capitol City residents the Asylum…
Is “happy hard-core” on its way out? We can only hope, but first we will need a few good angry men such as These Arms Are Snakes. As part of the emergent clan of art-laden hard-core groups like those found on the Hydrahead label, this Seattle troupe believes in texture…
Among the bands to explode from the Bright Eyes-anchored Omaha indie-pop scene in recent years was Tilly and the Wall. To those who haven’t enjoyed the treat of listening to the sweet melodies and guy-gal vocals of 2004’s Wild Like Children (the first release from Conor Oberst’s Team Love label)…
Yes, today’s young country can also sometimes rock without it sounding silly and forced, and few acts in that realm do it with as much punch and polish as these two. Dierks Bentley leans far enough outside the Nashville tried-and-true to eschew a cowboy-hat topper and play an electric six-string…
The laws of music journalism state that when a precociously good new band comes along, one must harp on the members’ ages. So, OK, blah blah blah, the four members of Nashville’s Be Your Own Pet are all teenagers, the oldest just barely legal. Great—now that’s out of the way…
Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck were not in London in March 2003, when Dixie Chick Natalie Maines told a Shepherd’s Bush Empire audience, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” The filmmakers wanted to be there—they had begged to be there, in…
The beauty of Regina Spektor is in her balance, between high and low art, classical and popular music, the profoundly poetic and the utterly mundane. This idyllic synthesis is what makes the Moscow-born Jewish singer-songwriter both as graspable as the street-savvy girl next door that parties with the Strokes and…
If there is such a genre as ambient Americana, then Tom Freund is its standard bearer. First gaining attention as a touring member of pioneering roots rockers the Silos, Freund has parlayed a decade-long friendship with Ben Harper into a series of atmospherically rustic releases that culminated in 2004’s Copper…
I’m beginning to think every band in Dallas should be a tribute band. It’s not that we don’t have our fair share of delightful groups, to be sure, but at last weekend’s Double Wide Halloween tribute show everyone seemed to be having such a damn fine time—so many fists pumping…
Oklahoma-born, occasionally Texan (he’s spent some years in the Lone Star State), songwriter Jimmy Webb has a history as a musician’s dream. Webb wrote some of the great classics of the modern era—”Up, Up and Away,” “Galveston” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”—deceptively poppy hits that actually comprise…
The subculture of tribute bands is a dark and mysterious one. It seems that lurking beneath the surface of every local music scene is an undercover army of musicians who, for whatever reason, spend their time honing their craft, toiling away for hours upon end to become living extensions of…
The following events have been irresponsibly fictionalized for dramatic effect. However, the names have not been changed. The Dallas Banjo Band claims to have formed back in 1989, and you’d be hard pressed to find any history on them prior to that. At first, it would appear as though this…
Les Claypool has always understood that without a good dose of humor, instrumental virtuosity can produce music as empty as Eddie Van Halen’s noggin. As leader of Primus, Claypool successfully melded his overpowering bass-guitar skills with a keenly sly wit and thrilled an unlikely demographic of air-guitar-playing frat boys and…
This doesn’t sound like a Willie Nelson record, and it doesn’t sound like a Ryan Adams record; dunno what it sounds like, to be honest, save for some show-offy mash-up that does less to pump up Shotgun Willie than shoot his legs out from under him. Not that pairing Nelson…
Wherein Tom Waits cleans out the closet, holds a garage sale and finds the crowd begging for more, more, more. Hence the 26 soundtrack-compilation-etc. familiars and 30 “new” songs that sound like all the old ones, spread over three discs that glibly and ably summarize the career thus far: “Brawlers”…
I’d probably exceed my allotted word count just roll calling all the A-list amigos that appear on Hi-Tek’s latest release. Established hip-hop statesmen like Q-Tip, Nas, Talib Kweli, Common, Ghostface Killah and Raekwon (among many others) drop solid contributions on top of a neck-snapping, toe-tapping canvas of orchestral loops, bleating…
Because he recorded for countless labels over the course of seven decades, John Lee Hooker’s hugely influential brand of blues and boogie has never been successfully anthologized until now. This four-disc set clocks in at more than four hours and features 85 examples of Hooker’s distinctive brilliance. It’s a massive…
Gerard Way offers his critics plenty to ridicule on the latest Romance CD, including unbridled theatricality, more classic-rock nods than even Lenny Kravitz typically offers and the sort of show-biz shamelessness that hipsters consider terminally uncool. Yet the garish over-the-topness of the entire twisted enterprise is precisely why this disc…
For more than a decade, Damien Jurado has flown under the radar as this generation’s Nick Drake. Jurado has a hushed, fragile vocal that’s a pleasant complement to his minimal instrumentation. But what sets him apart from his deceased ’70s counterpart is how well he crafts a string of despairing…
Good metal is hard to come by these days. For a while, the fallout from the late-’90s rap-rock explosion threatened to undo forever all that is good and metal in the universe. Luckily, new blood continues to flow. Orlando’s Trivium unleashes faithful metal epics that channel late-’80s Anthrax and Cliff…
