It’s not surprising that Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity, counts Marah as one of his favorite bands. They’re exactly the type of band his most famous protagonist, Rob Fleming, would obsess over. The band even wrote a song set in a record store eerily similar to Fleming’s Championship Vinyl…
Lyle Steadham needed a break. He was managing a Web site consulting business, a record label and a band at the same time, so he took time off from all of them in late 2004 to relax. Maybe throw a barbecue or two. But a brush with death changed that–no,…
Whether it’s the story of a musician’s rise, fall and possible redemption or a flavors-of-the-moment soundtrack in a lame teen comedy, film and music have gone together like popcorn and Junior Mints, fountain drinks and whiskey flasks or baggy pants and smuggled candy. The commercial success of music biopics Ray…
Dear D4L, I address you in a public forum, but I nurse a private wound. Indeed, so grievous is my pain that once again I have stilled the rivers of fudge and shuttered my factory. I can do nothing now but lie in bed in utter darkness and await death,…
By Monday, you couldn’t turn on a computer in Dallas without seeing Michelle Metzinger’s bloody face. The 25-year-old member of local roller derby league Assassination City Roller Derby found herself at the center of an Internet publicity firestorm. Blogs, message boards and MySpace posts made their way to the farthest…
A holy place: You were never supposed to hear about Sanctuary Studios. The DIY space was designed from the ground up as an entirely atypical music venue because, well, it wasn’t technically a music venue to begin with. “It was a living situation-type thing,” co-owner Aaron Gonzalez says. He and…
When Jenny Lewis’ solo debut sashays its way into record stores this Tuesday, it will surely be smothered in stickers–“Lead singer of Rilo Kiley…you know, those cute indie-rock darlings who were recently signed to Warner Bros. Oh, and Jenny starred in the movies Troop Beverly Hills and The Wizard too.”…
This Oakland-based R&B singer spends plenty of time on her second album describing the indelible virtues of everlasting love. Example: “First Love,” a lush slow jam with fluttering electric guitar and tinkly Motown piano in which she flashes back “six days into spring where our story begins,” recounts her slow…
This outta-nowhere gem might have stayed in the mines had it not been pimped by one of the better music blogs out there, Womenfolk (www.womenfolk.net). The site offered a single tune from the disc–a lovely, catchy, haunting cover of Modest Mouse’s “Third Planet From the Sun”–but helpfully mentioned the entire…
The premise of the CD/DVD combo of White Limousine is that someone can first listen to the CD as “intended” and then fire up the DVD in a computer, load a special program and change or remix the album’s songs however they’d like. It’s either a gimmick to hype the…
If it were 1978, Mute Math would definitely be called a “skinny tie band.” With obvious influences in the Police and, um, the Fixx, this New Orleans foursome thankfully updates its sound with ambient textures and some kinetic psych-pop songwriting. Heralded on several religious websites (uh-oh), the songs on their…
After sending freak-folk king Devendra Banhart off to the greener pastures of V2 Recordings, Michael Gira’s Young God Records continued to show its impeccable taste with the signing of Akron/Family, quite possibly the most original new band to make its mark on 2005. Like a backwoods Animal Collective with better…
Luther Dickinson and his brother Cody come genuinely draped in Southern musical kudzu, being the offspring of renegade producer and artiste Jim Dickinson (whose adventures span from playing piano on the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” to producing the most kick-ass Replacements album, Pleased to Meet Me). As members of the…
Matt Pike has finally gotten so stoned, he’s decided to try something different. Pike is the former leader of Sleep, who almost single-handedly carved out the genre known as stoner rock from the remains of Black Sabbath’s fetid carcass. Pike’s current band High On Fire built on 2002’s dominating Surrounded…
Evil Eddie Richards’ legendary dance résumé should be an easy sell in any forward-thinking metropolitan town, right? He played early gigs at some of the first UK clubs to feature American house music and was instrumental in introducing house to the burgeoning Manchester scene in the mid-’80s. Never stagnant, Eddie…
Most people have a natural mental membrane that filters their feelings, thoughts, theories and emotions before spewing them out into the world unchecked. Some don’t. If Mwanza Dover ever had one, it’s long since been overpowered by his boundless passion, restlessness and creativity–not to mention his flair for the dramatic…
If your taste in music is so safe, bland and generic that you think Christian rock can get a little too “saucy,” then you’re in luck, thanks to Dallas’ latest everything-on-the-radio clones Belafonte. Sure, there’s something for every radio rock fan to like on this debut EP–after all, Belafonte apes…
Despite her self-consciously sleazy stage shtick, Chantal Claret, the busty rock chick who leads this New York electro-trash act, doesn’t quite muster the live-wire esprit of her scene sister Karen O, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman famous for pouring beer on herself. Luckily for her bandmates, Claret doesn’t seem to…
Some soul singers have sung their joy–Sam Cooke and Stevie Wonder not least–and made their best art. But Anthony Hamilton comes from a bluesier tradition, with a lilting, earthbound voice that knows struggle and a masterwork in 2003’s heavy Comin’ From Where I’m From. Ain’t Nobody Worryin’, despite overall smoother…
Last year, a friend came to me desperate for a proper album to play at his father’s funeral. A stack of suggestions later, the service was graced by a true musical nirvana via the gentle, deliberate drones of Windy & Carl. The Michigan husband-and-wife duo must have planted a fly…
Bruce Springsteen may be the mythic New Jersey hero, but the true soul of the Garden State is manifested in Bon Jovi. Hear me out. At first blush, in the mid-1980s, with their shopping mall mullets and suburban rock dude drag, they were far more everyman than the proletariat of…
Uncle Tupelo made explicit how the roots of punk and hard-core honky-tonk intermingled: the rejection (often drunken) of instrumental competence, the politics of desire and its immediate and sometimes disastrous effects. Whether it has been cowpunk in the ’80s or alt-country the following decade, these two seemingly disparate genres have…
