Critic's Notebook

R&B fusionist Jake Quillin is relaxing in his new home in Texas and talking about his old job as a pizza maker in Tennessee.

Album release parties are normally joyous events for a band, but for D and Chi, the event is bittersweet. The party will honor a bandmember who died during the pandemic, but whose music celebrates life.

Traditional radio is alive and well, even if streaming is overtaking the way we consume music.

Last year, Drake Livingston was an average teenager chasing a dream and trying to find his place in the world

For about a decade, Ashley Leer lead the experimental post-punk group Def Rain. For about three years, she’s also lead the indie-pop group Abbreviations — at times abbreviated as ABBV.

Local hip-hop group Greyspot Syndicate has a growing reputation in the Dallas music scene.

Bars are a pillar upon which a city’s culture is built. They provide stages and meditative spaces for writers and artists and propel careers for entertainers and entire art movements.

On Tuesday, a video surfaced on Twitter of rapper Auntie AJ performing at The Haltom Theater in Haltom City, and some white people really didn’t like it.

The pandemic and political climate have forced us to evolve over the past year. Musician Alton Blake welcomes that chance for change. On his debut single, the cozy, piano-driven “Lately,” the singer-songwriter seeks redemption for his old ways. Blake, 24, began writing the song “about a year ago, when the…

For the last year or so, Andrew Holmes has been working on a van. So far, the singer-songwriter has added an AC unit, some nice shelving, a bed and a kitchenette, among many other things that make his soon-to-be home quite homey.

Many people only survived the last 15 months thanks to mutual aid efforts by social justice communities and organizations. One of those groups is the United Peoples Coalition, which was created last summer by Dallas music veteran Patrick Averhart.

This past Saturday afternoon, hip-hop artist Raekwon hosted an exclusive pop-up shop inside Mockingbird Station streetwear apparel store Centre.

It’s been a long week for Victor Rimach. The founder and owner of Chasquis, a local independent music booking agency, had brought Colombian DJ Ynfynyt Scroll to perform at the Arcade Bar at Bowlski’s Lakewood Theater on Wednesday, June 9, where Rimach also performed as Sudaka. He then played alongside…

Get that Atticus clothing ready and start brushing up on each state’s age of consent laws, because if TikTok trends are an accurate litmus test (and they often are), pop-punk is back!

FIT began as a conversation between two Hunters. For some time, Hunter Moehring had been wanting to do a project aside from his work with Sealion to do something with his friend Hunter Cannon of Coywolfe, The Birds of Night and Strokes tribute band Different Strokes. “Hunter and I had…

In 1969, as the free love-obsessed hippie movement was giving way to a more spacy 1970s, author Philip K. Dick wrote a short story, “The Electric Ant, ” a cerebral sci-fi piece about a person stuck between being a robot or a man.

When the killing of George Floyd inspired protests across the world last summer, Dallas marched for the cause.

In 2016, Dallas rapper Bobby Sessions earned a Dallas Observer Music Award nomination for Best Album for LOA (Law of Attraction), which contains an image of a Grammy on the cover along with phrases such as “Manifest everything” and “What you think, you become.

On a fateful day in June three years ago, rapper Frank Rashad received the wake up call of his life. After a terrifying car accident, in which his car flipped over, Rashad decided life was too short for him to spend his days working for someone other than himself.

What is a perfect band? Is it one like The Beatles, whose universal influence is nearly matched by their timeless popularity and maintained by their four distinct, iconic and deified personas?

Now that concerts are resuming in 3D, Dallas is once again a primo tour spot destination for music’s biggest artists.

On Sept. 24, the State Fair is returning after a brief interruption in its 135-year run. And Big Tex is back with all the fixins.