The Wu-Tang Clan shouldn’t still exist. In an industry where today’s rap superstars become tomorrow’s MC Hammer, nine Staten Island MCs pulled off the impossible. They outlasted the three great pitfalls of modern hip-hop: ego battles, gang violence and, most important, irrelevance. Rappers worldwide would be wise to learn from…
Last Thursday, the nomination ballot for the 2005 Dallas Observer Music Awards went online. Since then, I’ve had several conversations like this: Me: Have you voted yet? Them: What are you talking about? Me: This year, we’re letting readers pick the nominations for the Observer Music Awards. Them: That’s interesting…
Aqueduct is where indie rock meets mainstream pop. The band (in the studio, it’s mainly Tulsa jack-of-all-trades David Terry, although other players join live) takes the now-revered sounds of ’80s synth bands and combines those with the guilty pleasures of MTV-friendly heavy metal. These songs are so catchy they make…
“Human hearts and pain should never be separate,” Jason Molina sings in “The Dark Don’t Hide It,” the first song on this live CD by his Bloomington, Indiana-based group Magnolia Electric Co. That’s a pretty handy crystallization of Molina’s work over the past decade, both with Magnolia and with Songs:…
When Sabina Sciubba, the only woman in the New York group that calls itself Brazilian Girls, sings, “I love the music on the radio/And this is how it goes,” you have to assume the radio she’s talking about is part crystal ball, because the instrumental break the band subsequently slips…
With their delectable debut last year, New York’s Scissor Sisters proved how far beyond electroclash they’d come since singer Jake Shears and multi-instrumentalist Babydaddy first started playing off-the-cuff shows around their adopted hometown nearly four years ago. For example, they write songs now–good ones, with choruses and everything! This DVD…
When he got the phone call, Salim Nourallah was not getting along with his brother–again. “You gotta read the paper,” his friend told him, and the blood drained from Salim’s face. In those days, news about the Nourallah brothers was generally bad news. More than a decade earlier, he and…
When I taught high school English, I was shocked at the number of students who planned to be rappers, singers and various other celebutantes. They imagined a future of limousines, backstage orgies and Cristal, free of nagging homework and grammar lessons. They did not question this fate, much as they…
On this superb collaboration, Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) play ballads with the intimacy of bunkmates, conjuring a parched farm where panther-girls and man-donkeys toil, love and spank one another. The sweet, absurd imagery would sound cloying in most hands, but Oldham’s un-self-conscious delivery makes his…
The Game is a protégé of Dr. Dre and 50 Cent, has the kind of gangbanger backstory that makes white journalists moist and he’s from the birthplace of gangsta rap (Compton), with the N.W.A. and Eazy-E tattoos to prove it. His debut, The Documentary, features guest spots by Dre, 50,…
With synth pop making an unexpected comeback, the timing couldn’t be better for a new Erasure album. Vince Clarke’s infectious recordings with Depeche Mode, Yaz, the Assembly and, of course, Erasure helped create the blueprint for electronic dance pop, while Andy Bell’s soulful vocals and flamboyant persona added a critical…
Did you say this was Lou Barlow’s first ever solo album? What gives? Barlow’s been the dominant force in everything he’s done since exiting Dinosaur Jr. at the end of the ’80s, including bushels of four-track home recordings as Sentridoh and variants thereof. He’s been touted as the king of…
The great thing about technology is its power to combine all the kinds of music you like into one cohesive song. Uncannily, the Chemical Brothers have accomplished this feat repeatedly, building around a genuine pop structure and cleverly managing to make a loop feel like a song, as on “Block-Rockin’…
Andrew Bird is a singer-songwriter and violinist-for-hire who spent some time in the late ’90s with quirky swing-band revivalists the Squirrel Nut Zippers. A few years ago, he moved from Chicago to a northwestern Illinois farming community where his family owned a barn, which he fancied turning into a recording…
Tired of spinners, chrome and bling? Then check out the hottest new shit in hip-hop: a rapping spider named MC Pee Pants who wears diapers and tries to rule the world by yelling about candy. It’s the jam! All right, so the bizarre moment on Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger…
Andy Bothwell looks like just another tow-headed, vintage-T-shirt-wearing college guy you might see weaving through Deep Ellum, looking to score another round. As Astronautalis, one of the growing breed of hip-hop performers who dress more like indie rockers, Bothwell has been called a cross between Eminem and Atom and His…
Leave it to Steve Earle to make a rock-the-vote record that sounds as good in the cold light of Bush II as it did last fall. “Voting is vital,” Earle writes in The Revolution Starts Now’s liner notes, “but in times like these voting alone simply isn’t enough.” So he…
Chances are Bright Eyes’ Fort Worth show is sold out by now, so why plug it? Well, the current tour was originally labeled a softer affair, but recent reviews have called it fiery and raucous, so consider this a warning–Monday’s show won’t be wimpy, quiet emo. Take earplugs…
In one memorable moment of Nick Hornby’s collection of confessional rock essays, Songbook, he gushes about Nelly Furtado’s “I’m Like a Bird.” It’s a surprising choice, not only because that song is better suited to Wet Seal customers than a middle-aged scribe but also because Hornby is the author of…
When Luna takes the stage at Sons of Hermann Hall on Saturday, it will be the last time the band plays Dallas. After 14 years, the sleepy-eyed indie rock favorite is breaking up. But for front man Dean Wareham, this conclusion is hardly the stuff that tearjerkers are made of…
So far, 2005 hasn’t been the best of times for Dallas musicians. Last week, we reported on a legal tangle that has the fate of the Curtain Club hanging in the balance. Next came news that before the Camper Van Beethoven concert at the Gypsy Tea Room on January 18,…
Ideally, before reading this review, you would have already played Before the Dawn Heals Us at exceedingly high volume on the best speakers you could find. Sure, that would make reading difficult–seeing as how your mind would be blown to bits–but opening track “Moonchild” works much better without knowing that…
