Ever since Doug Sahm passed away in 1999, there’s been a Sahm-sized hole deep in the heart of Texas. Sir Doug was the consummate Texas musician, equally adept at country, blues, rock, conjunto and Western swing–combining all these genres into an innovative brand of music that sounded like nothing but…
If you thought there were a lot of wiry, tattooed freaks hanging around the Granada before last March’s Steve Vai show, then you ain’t seen nothing. The American Metal Blast tour has the market cornered on sleazy, L.A. street-level ’80s cock rock, where the voices aren’t too shrill and the…
Man Factory didn’t want me to hear their demo. That’s what the Arlington band told their good friend Eric Michener, known better as Denton’s Fishboy, when they handed him a CD-R of their four-track experiments, and fortunately, he broke his promise and burnt me a copy. Indeed, the recklessness of…
Llano Avenue, written and performed by Dallas resident Darryl Lee Rush, is the least hip country effort you are likely to stumble across this year. Starkly produced and raggedly played songs like “Truale” and “Miles to Memphis” mix humor and misfortune with nods to roots mavericks Terry Allen and Billy…
Anton Newcombe is not a movie. I know he’s not, because I’ve seen him. His band, Brian Jonestown Massacre, had just played a gig near my New York apartment, and there he was around 1 a.m., sometime in early 2002, standing on the corner of Ludlow and Houston. Doing nothing…
Until recently, neo-soul crooner John Legend was known as John Stephens, his given moniker. Legend says he made the switch to draw more attention to his work and to challenge him with “a higher standard to live up to.” It seems to have worked. In addition to seeing Get Lifted,…
With the number of great female-fronted bands in the DFW area, you’d think door guys at local music clubs would get a clue. But when Taylor Reed, lead singer and guitarist of Denton’s Cordelane, played a Deep Ellum concert only a few weeks ago, she was reminded that the struggle…
Glove to get drunk: Four years ago, the Dallas Observer took a feature-length look at the trials and tribulations that befell Rubber Gloves before it finally opened in October 2000. A series of disagreements with city officials, building inspectors and zoning boards threatened to keep the Denton music club from…
“Bro Hymn,” from Pennywise’s self-titled, full-length 1992 debut, ranks among the most singular songs in punk history. None of the group’s peers could pull off such a staggeringly earnest ode to friendship. Bad Religion is too brainy, Green Day too wimpy and Rancid too proudly purist. Like most powerful schmaltz,…
Elliott Smith may be dead, but his spirit and voice haunt every track on Pajo. David Pajo, the former Slint member who has previously recorded as Papa M and Aerial M, uses his own name this time, and with such personal songs, the return to his real name is quite…
Three Brazilians record Latin hip-hop in Amsterdam with legendary Jamaican producer Lee “Scratch” Perry, and the results are released on a San Francisco label. As if to throw the globe-mashing in listeners’ faces, the phrase “Everything is closer than you think” is printed on the CD jacket. Zuco 103 are…
One of the best pound-for-pound live rock n roll bands today has committed a cardinal sin: Kinski have gone and played too much rock. The Seattle quartet managed to please pretty much everybody with their 2003 Sub Pop bow, Airs Above Your Station, which fused their proclivity for minimalist psychedelia…
In the very last line of the very last page of Beautiful Noise’s liner notes, Salim Nourallah issues a thank-you to “the neurosurgeons at Children’s Medical Center Dallas.” Really, this tucked-away detail is where the album starts. Nourallah has openly stated that his sophomore solo album was inspired in part…
Robbie Fulks has made a career out of pissing people off in creative ways. After building a cult following with two mid-’90s platters of hardcore ’50s honky-tonk, Fulks took an ambitious twang-pop turn on Let’s Kill Saturday Night and 2001’s Couples in Trouble, confusing some fans but never abandoning the…
Like a lot of teenage girls in the ’90s, I spent years pining for Bush lead singer Gavin Rossdale, inscribing the words to “Comedown” on my zip-up Mead binder and dutifully chugging out the chords to “Machinehead” on my guitar. But my adolescence, like Bush, is over, so how excited…
Guest-singing on “Peoria Lunch Box Blues” from Songs:Ohia’s 2003 release Magnolia Electric Co. , Scout Niblett sounded like a ghost singing from beyond the grave. Like her contemporary Cat Power, Niblett’s voice shines brightest when her accompaniment is spare and barren. Her songs usually consist of only her voice and…
Some bands are must-sees when they come through town for the sheer fact that they tour so rarely. Two Cow Garage isn’t that band–if you miss their broken-down-van cow-punk this time, chances are you’ll see ’em again as soon as November. Hell, the Columbus, Ohio trio is on the road…
Texas doesn’t have a ton of natives with Grammys on their shelves–especially not 50+ year-olds who are still turning heads with their tasteful guitar chops. But that’s what you can expect from Eric Johnson, a man whose ear is so well-trained he can tell when a roadie puts the wrong…
Here’s a cultural riddle: Take an icon of a major pop movement and pretend the movement never happened: Ice Cube without gangsta rap, Ken Kesey without LSD, John Lydon without punk. What’s left? Would we ever even have heard of these guys? Like Lydon, Joe Strummer rose with punk and…
As VH1 recently informed us, “All reality is not created equal.” Apparently, reality involving celebrities is far more entertaining, and reality that exploits the vast archive of pop music is best of all. Numerous TV shows of the latter type have turned up this summer, and though none of them…
Let the Falcon soar: Two weeks ago, we reported that Golden Falcons drummer Jared Jackson became a long-distance member of the mind-blowing Dallas band after moving to Austin for grad school. Well, add guitarist Joshua Weber to the flown-the-coop-for-college list, as he splits town next week to start graduate classes…
Holopaw’s songs are a lot like the clouds on the cover of their newest album, Quit +/or Fight–beautiful, delicate and seemingly apt to float away at any time. Led by whisper-quiet singer John Orth, who also contributed to Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock’s Ugly Casanova project, Holopaw specializes in bleary-eyed…
