With lyrics pokin’ fun at Texas music and a sound like a psychedelic garage band with killer steel guitar, Austin’s trippy Li’l Cap’n Travis is a dream substitute for all those pretty boys pouring their hearts out on MTV after midnight. Travis’ latest album, …In All Our Splendor, is packed…
From the outside, Jimmy Eat World’s studio in Tempe, Arizona, looks like another sterile office space in a quiet business complex. But walk through the entrance, and it becomes a surprisingly cozy rock-and-roll den. There’s enough cushy seating for a decent-sized party, and instruments are strewn everywhere–a drum kit in…
Love him or hate him–there rarely is a middle ground–Pat Green is the biggest thing to come out of Texas since, well, George W. Bush. And now that Green is entering his second term as a major-label artist with his Lucky Ones CD, it appears that quite a few of…
The tsunami reports were overwhelming–an endless wash of carnage and devastation–and in the days following the disaster, Jayme Nourallah had no idea what to do. “I just kept crying about it,” says Nourallah, a freelance photographer who had visited Indonesia a month before the disaster. She couldn’t stop looking at…
Dallas has some new reality show kings. A Dozen Furies has won The Battle for Ozzfest, a contest whose spoils include $60,000, a slew of new gear from Guitar Center, a spot on next year’s Ozzfest and a recording contract with Sanctuary Records (home to Black Sabbath). The winners were…
The post-Norah Jones phenomenon of standards albums by singers who don’t usually sing them has yielded the occasional alternate-universe proposition: Cyndi Lauper doing “La Vie en Rose”? Hey, middle-aged mothers just wanna have fun, too. Country vet Merle Haggard isn’t the least likely artist to rip through the Great American…
He was never going to be confused with Tupac while alive, but the late, great prankster Ol’ Dirty Bastard is now shadowing him in the lucrative hip-hop afterlife. Like Pac, he’s left a maternal hand on his till of posthumous product, the only question being how much of it exists…
Basically the brainchild of one Raymond Roposa, Castanets makes what he calls “derailed pysch-country.” Who am I to disagree with such astuteness? Cathedral is country as in western desert, sun-fried, things done in rural county shacks you don’t want to know about. Equal parts Daniel Johnson and Syd Barrett if…
With Marianne Faithfull, it’s always been about the voice–hoarse and knowing, the wet cough of experience. It made her a pop star in the ’60s, a punk-disco diva in the ’70s, a rock-jazzbo curio in the ’80s and comeback kid forever after as she piled on the collaborators (Hal Willner,…
Dallas drummers don’t get enough credit. The metroplex is home to amazing skin-smiths, and while Adam Vanderkolk may not necessarily be the best to highlight during such a discussion, he plays a crucial role on The Hourly Radio’s debut EP. You won’t hear much in the way of crazy fills…
Sometime during the dizzying barrage of roars, moans and pterodactyl groans spraying from the Wreck Room stage, I remembered what Ghostcar guitarist Daniel Huffman told me before the show about trumpet player Karl Poetschke. “Karl is kind of elusive. Karl lives on a boat, or sometimes out in the desert.”…
Orange County’s Eighteen Visions don’t quite manage the stylistic breadth their name implies on their major-label debut, Obsession, but for emo-metal, they’re way ahead of the curve. Expanding outward from a base of the straight-edge hardcore that originally inspired them to forgo the teenage traditions of drug and drink, they…
The sound of Jonathan Segel’s violin went a long way in distinguishing Camper Van Beethoven from other ’80s alt-rock bands, but Segel himself was long gone by the time the band called it quits. The culprit? Too many songwriting head-butts with Camper front man David Lowery. And as Segel says,…
“Best show of the week” could be a stretch, but “most interesting show of the week” without question. Jad Fair sat in with the biggest DIY band of the past 25 years, Half Japanese, and made a career out of ignoring the notion that talent is necessary to rock. The…
For the rest of us, language flows in a straightforward neural pathway before it reaches our tongues. Not for Aesop Rock. The New York City MC’s cryptic and poetic lyrical flow has earned him critical acclaim and a worldwide following, and he has become an independent hero in an age…
The Deathray Davies can’t share their best road stories. They can share some advice, some pleasant memories, but their best stories, come on–those are the ones that take place in dark alleyways and strangers’ bedrooms, the nights that would be unforgettable if only…well, if only they hadn’t been so damn…
The keg is tapped, the air is gray, and cigarette butts float like rotten cherries in half the drinks on the counter. Everyone’s paired off, either contemplating the bathroom or arguing over when The Golden Girls jumped the shark. You need to get people focused. You need to get this…
New Year’s Eve concerts? No thanks. Overpriced tickets and drunken crowds are hardly worth a free glass of champagne, but the worst comes when the music stops while couples sneak midnight kisses. Lucky for bitter, single music fans, the Gypsy Tea Room concert on the day before New Year’s Eve…
Last year, I wrote more than 37,000 words in this column space–that’s the better part of a novel or, at least, one long-winded blog entry. Skimming over those columns is like watching the year in fast-forward: From the opening of Deep Ellum Blues to the closing of XPO Lounge, from…
This two-disc set from Seattle’s greatest prog-pop band after Queensrche will undoubtedly be overshadowed by Nirvana’s With the Lights Out–which makes sense, as Pearl Jam was overshadowed by Nirvana when both bands actually existed, too. But if Rearviewmirror feels less momentous than Nirvana’s hit-and-miss scrap heap, it’s no faint praise…
In a brilliant assessment of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, critic Dave Marsh wrote that classical rock would never succeed simply by mating the complexity of one musical form to the volume of another. More recently, there has been no greater evidence of Marsh’s wisdom as Metallica shredding away while a…
It’s happenstance, of course, that Pixar released The Incredibles at roughly the same time international supervillain MF Doom dropped his third (his third!) album of 2004, MM..Food. Or maybe, just maybe, the CGI masters and the luminary of underground hip-hop found themselves drawn by a mysterious force to the same…
