It’s not too late to set the mood for Valentine’s Day, lovers. You can still get a fancy restaurant reservation, a few bottles of fine wine and, most important, the right music for the right night. And who better to suggest hot tunes for hot times than local rockers and…
With delicate tunes and referential album titles like The Boy With the Arab Strap, Belle and Sebastian main man Stuart Murdoch has more or less birthed a scene of pop miniaturists known as twee. But Murdoch is moving ever closer to potential fans who are neither overeducated nor budding sophisticates…
P.O.D. have stuck around longer than many of their erstwhile rap-rock bros by actively embracing the properties of radio pop: They’ve never shied from soaring choruses, nor have they kept their music free of the shiny production values that keep them from sounding too out of place next to Mariah…
In the late ’90s, the suffix “-tronica” could loosely be defined as “pop music to which drum loops have been glued.” It was a goofy movement, one built on the questionable logic that adding a bunch of synthetic clatter to measly acoustic pop somehow makes it less dull. British songwriter…
Were Ed Hamell just a transgressive punk with an acoustic guitar, who’d pay attention? But like the late comedian Bill Hicks, Hamell doses out his angry liberalism (and libertinism) with style. On his new album, Songs for Parents Who Enjoy Drugs, Hamell, the one-man band, comments on the state of…
If you’ve ever sewn a Venom patch onto a sleeveless jean jacket, you must see Early Man. This New York duo mines metal’s Paleolithic era–the early ’80s–for chugging, head-bobbing riffs, Ozzy-style vocals and some sweet vintage tees. The band’s debut, Closing In, is all about feeling 25 feet tall and…
Lots of acts staged their first gigs at Manhattan’s CBGB, but Prong is one of the few that the club actually birthed, when the soundman approached the doorman about starting a band. That sound guy, remaining original Prong member Tommy Victor, is an icon of the first early ’90s wave…
“The world doesn’t need any more pretty good songs,” says Mary Gauthier. And at a time when too many singer-songwriters scribble greeting-card copy and pep-rally cheers, Gauthier meets her mission statement with incisive and literate slices of real life. Her burnished voice bears the mark of her personal history; given…
You might expect a Scandinavian band to revel in the standard death-metal throes of unintelligible caterwauling, exaggerated tempo shifts and anal-retentive instrumental prowess, yet the well-coifed members of Sonata Arctica embrace a naïvely dated and, dare I say, sweeter notion of phallic guitars and high-pitched pyrotechnics. The Finland band’s recent…
On Friday, the Liquid Lounge bar didn’t make a killing in drink sales, but the club certainly served up a fine blend onstage. Though Silk Stocking’s opening set was shortened by sound issues, Liz McGowan howled and growled an extraordinary path while both courting and bitch-slapping Shawn Mauck’s guitar lines…
Local bands, take note: When a weekly newspaper talks shit about your music and gives you grief about changing your formula on a new album, don’t write pithy e-mails to complain. Go the Slowride route instead. The Dallas trio disappointed two years ago with sophomore album Building a Building by…
In the hedonism of the early ’90s UK club scene, something had to give. Sounds had stagnated and people were starting to understand the “dark side” of a steady diet of ecstasy and glow sticks. With rampant commercialism and subsequent unrest in the hard-core creative community, a club night was…
I walked to the Curtain Club on Friday night and asked a young lady at the door about press entry to the Dallas Music Festival. She gave me a puzzled look, said she wasn’t sure about press access and fuddled around a bit. I pulled out my wallet–I didn’t want…
Nice job: Far be it from us to take credit for something good, but man, K104 Uncut has to be our fault to some degree, right? At the end of 2005, we laid down a challenge to local hip-hop radio leaders 97.9 The Beat and K104: Put more local rappers…
If all goes according to plan, next year will herald the release of about a dozen never-before-heard songs from the songwriting team that all but created rock ‘n’ roll. And even though Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the men behind hundreds of R&B “race records” and early rock hits including…
“You’re my mousy aesthete,” croons Kevin Barnes above a pleasing din of chugging synthesizers, spritely guitars and massed harmonies. “I never want to be your little, friendly, abstract failure.” The words are from the chorus of “So Begins Our Alabee” from The Sunlandic Twins, the latest CD by Barnes’ Of…
Dallas music snobs, here is your record for 2006. Go ahead–set the CD for On Leaping From Airplanes in the stereo, put your Funland pajamas on, curl up in your Tripping Daisy bedsheets and dim the UFOFU nightlight, so that you might fall asleep and dream of a nostalgic era…
Niece of acclaimed songwriter Vic Chestnutt, Liz Durrett is a 20-something Southern gothic wunderkind, a Georgia native who understands the poignant effect of the deliberately slow pace, the impact of space and dirge, the value of lament and loss set to music. Full of emotionally distraught tunes that take full…
Of all the artists that the fan-approved, critically underrated Rhymesayers label has discovered in recent years, Stefon Leron “P.O.S.” Alexander may be the most intriguing. A black punk-rocker from Minneapolis who leads his city’s up-and-coming Doomtree hip-hop collective, P.O.S. (which stands for “Product of Society,” “Pissed-Off Stef” and many other…
Out of Birmingham, Alabama, comes this Southern-fried greasy punk, all snarling lips and attitude, equal parts Axl Rose and Keith Richards with a fashion sense copped from Bowie to boot. Hollingsworth’s second effort ups the ante considerably over last year’s Shoot Me, Shoot Me, Heaven, presenting a charmingly ramshackle loser…
Was I seeing ghosts, or did Deep Ellum just move? Maybe she was writhing and kicking in deathbed pain from yet another wounding club closure, or maybe her body was being molested by necrophiliacs who never had the chance while she was alive. Either way, for about a half-hour Friday…
Somewhere between the naked beauty of Low and the gut-wrenching intensity of the Swans lies Shiny Around the Edges, a husband and wife duo from Denton that likes its songs wrapped in an ear-bending sheath of finely-combed feedback. If the material off their fine Secrets of the Double Blind CD-R…
