Critic's Notebook

For reals. –Pete Freedman…

Take this with a grain of salt, Denton, as the magazine also lists She & Him’s Volume One as the album of the year (sure, Zooey Deschanel’s a looker, but is the album really that good?), but congratulations are in order: Paste magazine’s December issue hit the stands this week…

Rick Nielsen and his quintuple-neck guitar, which is perhaps one of the reasons writer Darryl Smyers refers to him as “uber-nerd.” Last week, Sony Legacy released a 30th anniversary edition box set of At Budokan, Cheap Trick’s remarkable entrance into popular culture. Sure, the Illinois quartet had released three previous…

The new Dimebag Darrell Abbott book/DVD He Came To Rock earns its release today with the claim that it’s the first book about the legendary Pantera guitarist’s life (a fact that certainly can’t sit too well with a certain other Dimebag biographer…), and, unlike the other upcoming book about the…

Here’s great news for anyone who wants to trip their balls off Thursday night, or who can appreciate what the Angelika web site calls “a mind-blowing, almost indescribable mix of fantasy, religious symbolism, horror and humor” without chemicals: The Dallas Angelika Theater will screen a remastered 35-mm print of Alejandro…

The Denton-bred, Austin-refined Riverboat Gamblers, just a few weeks removed from a return to DdFW for a couple of shows, have officially announced the details surrounding the band’s upcoming 2009 disc, Underneath The Owl–which is basically to say that the band has officially set the release date for March 10…

Oh my, they are already beginning to trickle in… Those pesky, quickly made Christmas-themed–sorry, I mean holiday-themed [Jewish Editor’s Note: Damn right you did!]–musical products are already hitting shelves everywhere. Hell, I got a Christmas CD by Christian/pop singer Amy Grant in May! But, sadly and predictably, most of the…

Dear rare Dallas music fan who wouldn’t mind being seen in Uptown this weekend, According to this blog post I just stumbled across, there’s gonna be some sort of Wii Music demonstration thing with street performers and stuff tomorrow and Sunday at West Village. Might be cool. Dunno. But it…

Tonight at the Double Wide, in honor of the great Chelsea Callahan’s birthday, the venue is throwing Cha-Cha’s 5th Annual Rock-And-Roll for Charity. And it’s a pretty busy event, starting tonight at 8 and running until the bar closes at 2 in the morn’. There’s free bbq from Sonny Bryan’s…

OMFG: Maybe you saw Gossip Girl this week and you were, like, totally captivated by the storylines: Where will Jenny live now? Why does Dan always have to have such a conscience? What’s up with Serena’s new boy-toy? Also: Blair got totally out-smarted, WTF?!?! Not that I’ve ever seen the…

No one’s gonna mistake Lower Greenville’s The Libertine for a live music venue–DJ nights and Scaraoke aside–but anyone who’s ever spent a few minutes in this phenomenal establishment knows two things: a) As Lower Greenville bars go, The Libertine’s over-PA playlist is tops, and b) the people who put the…

Sean Kirkpatrick tickling away. (Kris Youmans) So, it’s kind of a slow blog day, and this is kinda old news, but what the hell… We’re always down for a little Sean Kirkpatrick around these parts. And on that note, we present this: a free four-track EP download of Kirkpatrick covering…

They’re the men in the box. Ugly Mus-tard, the unnecessarily hyphenated industrial-metalheads who were featured in the Dallas Observer back in 1995 and earned the “Best Industrial/Dance” Dallas Observer Music Award in ’96, is back. To put it mildly, their sound has not aged well. Their minor radio hit “High”…

Despite being in his 70s, country music legend Merle Haggard has always seemed to make his way to Dallas a couple of times a year. And hopefully that trend will continue after Haggard recovers from lung surgery at his home in Bakersfield, California. A recent biopsy revealed that Haggard had…

There’s two shows as part of this year’s ordeal, and a pretty blatant difference between them. Show No.1 (Or: How The Dude Rock Stole Christmas) Thursday, December 4, at House of Blues Blue October, Hoobastank, Deep Ella Show No. 2 (Or: How The Edge Went A Little More Indie) Friday,…

With little more than talent and a MySpace page, Pleasant Grove rapper Anonymous has managed to build enough buzz to catch the attention of Parade of Flesh and snag a couple headlining gigs at The Lounge on Elm Street, including a pre-Inauguration party January 17, 2008 2009. Why all the…

Consider the Trail of Dead and Municipal Waste giveaways from this afternoon an appetizer: At random points throughout the day tomorrow, we’ll be dolling out a total of 26 individual tickets (13 pairs) to five various shows happening around the region this weekend. And, as always, we’ll be giving them…

Thrash act Municipal Waste, whose straight-ahead, in-your-face sound comes straight outta Richmond, Virginia, hits the stage at Lola’s Saloon in Fort Worth tonight–an interesting choice of venue, for sure, given the band’s penchant for wild-ass shows and the venue’s penchant for yelling at bands (cough–Dark Meat–cough) that make a mess…

Just double-checked with Club Dada co-owner Ben Tapia to see if the plan to re-open the venue, whose doors have been locked for the past two days because the club was behind on its rent payments, was still a go for tonight. His answer: Yes. “We’re glad you missed us,”…

Today, about two-and-a-half months after National Public Radio picked Sarah Jaffe’s “Even Born Again” as its song of the day in late August, NPR again takes a break from a pledge drive to honor to another North Texas act. (Thanks to an eagle-eyed Friend of DC9 for the tip.) This…

That sea…so arrogant right now…that sea… (Melanie Gomez) …and it’s yet another positive one for the Gray family collective. Writes reviewer Henry Freedland: Although several tracks never quite develop beyond lulling repetition, and Matthew Gray’s lyrics have the tendency to nudge whimsical absurdity into outré distractions (“Last time I saw…

Maybe you know DJ Z-Trip. Maybe you don’t. He’s a pretty big deal on the touring DJ circuit, though. Know that. And he got himself fairly involved in the election, throwing various “Party for Change” events across the country alongside Shepard Fairey–the guy responsible for this image, which we lampooned…