Let me guess: You don’t like classical music. The very words make you itch like a new church suit, make you check to see if your shirttail is hanging out. It’s not that classical music is terrible; it’s just one of those fine art forms–like modern dance or abstract art–that…
At 7:10 last Thursday night, Davíd Garza took the stage at Club Dada. With just a guitar and a glass of red wine, he began playing through a handful of what he jokingly called “old geezer Deep Ellum classics”–Sara Hickman’s “Simply” and Edie Brickell and the New Bohemian’s “Little Miss…
Pray that John Darnielle’s friends don’t come to your party. Pray that they won’t show up on your doorstep all strung out, pissed off and half-wasted, ready to kill or die or fuck anything in their path. The Catholic convenience-store clerk is a real buzzkill when he starts bragging about…
For some of us, the phrase “adult contemporary jazz trumpeter” is about as inviting as watching Kenny G dry hump his soprano sax. Indeed, at first glance, Chris Botti’s music seems like the kind of lame, manufactured pap to which we avoid giving ink. But this guy’s for real–our unyielding…
If this were a perfect world, VH1’s Behind the Music series would cover worthwhile bands all the time. Since VH1 doesn’t cater to my tastes, however, I have to seek out books for underground music stories. I don’t get the lulling voiceover commentary or video footage of concerts while learning…
This weekend you have two chances to see two very cool rock bands. Single Frame is all ’80s synth chords washed over gyroscopic indie fuzz. With Henry Dent on drums, Brendan Reilly on guitar, Jason Schleter on keyboards/bass and all three singing, the music of this Austin band zings, whistles…
Everybody was drunk, the Weary Boys were tearing it up, and no one knew which one came first. But the floor trembled with foot stomps, and couples poured onto the dance floor, tumbling into each other and spilling their drinks. Old men at the bar looked up from their Jack…
A few weeks ago, I received a letter from a reader. “I think you have a great spark,” it began. (Or was it, “Shut yer pie hole, you stinking hack”? I get them all confused.) “And I would love to see you write about the Democratic Party candidates for 2004.”…
“Our motto: anything but Bush,” Lou Reed recently told Rolling Stone, voicing a refrain that’s becoming increasingly common among musicians. Not since the Reagan administration has a president catalyzed so much protest music: In the past year, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Don Henley, Moby, Willie Nelson and Tom Morello have…
In a South Austin coffeehouse, Patrice Pike locks eyes with her interviewer as she talks about herself and her career. It’s a gaze that’s direct but intense, with a warmth that feels almost seductive. It’s similar to the way Pike, a seasoned performer at the age of 33, addresses an…
“Speedtrucker, motherfucker!” shouted the crowd normally foreign to Club Clearview. These men and women were armed not with facial piercings but with bottles of Lone Star, and they donned not Urban Outfitters threads but Justin boots and cowboy hats. Still, the only surprise bigger than the good ol’ country crowd…
Although prefab teen pop is no longer a dominant force in the cultural zeitgeist, the idea of musical authenticity still overshadows the popular canon. Are shaggy hipster bands really starving Lower East Side garage rats, or does Daddy bankroll their bohemian, post-liberal arts lives? Do pretty girls still validate the…
The warm-and-fuzzy Glaswegian band Camera Obscura probably inspires lots of memories of lazy summers spent strolling through sunflower fields in the burnt-out survivors of the 1960s. Like their mates Belle & Sebastian (whose front man Stuart Murdoch helped produce the band’s 2001 debut, Biggest Blue Hi-Fi), they strum guitars gingerly…
In the past decade, former punk rockers The Notwist have evolved from raw anguish to smooth indie-pop electronica. The German quartet began in 1989 with two aggressive punk LPs, but their third album, 12, found them experimenting with keyboards and drum machines. Their latest EP, Different Cars and Trains, stretches…
At the moment, has-been pop stars like Rod Stewart and Michael McDonald have the interpretation of unlikely source material on lockdown; Stewart’s two Great American Songbook discs and McDonald’s Motown are attracting attention (and actual dollar bills) from folks who last bought a CD back when people thought Rod Stewart…
Chip Taylor was an answer on Jeopardy the other day. The question–for 500 points, Alex–was this: Who penned the Troggs’ hit record, “Wild Thing,” in the ’60s? The question also could have been: Who penned Juice Newton’s hit record, “Angel of the Morning,” in the ’70s? Or perhaps: What successful…
Coming of age as a punk-rock kid in the early ’90s was an emasculating experience. Feminism invaded the Pacific Northwest’s music scene at its apex a decade ago via record labels like Kill Rock Stars and K, while the region was setting trends that infected the entire country (read: Nirvana)…
A few weeks ago, as usual, we were speaking out of ignorance. “Why don’t local bands put out more compilation CDs?” we griped. “Why don’t they get together more often, do something cool and out of the ordinary?” We were thinking along the lines of hoot nights, actually, or a…
More Lou/VU live, of which there have been plenty and then some–more on-the-road discs than in-the-studio ones, if you’re willing to do the math and include the barely legal imports worth the price of emission. (The best remains 1969 Velvet Underground Live, with its unreleased songs and choruses; not bad…
Two weeks ago in these pages I tipped a hat to the “shortsighted,” “solipsistic,” “retro-fixated” princes of American (and Canadian) indie rock. Though I didn’t include them in the list that followed (because their 2003 album was a snooze)–who was I talking about if not Guided by Voices, the most…
It’s not easy being Hank Williams. Number one suffered a pained back and an ambitious hellcat of a wife in Miz Audrey, among other travails, before shuffling off this mortal coil. Two took a header off a mountain onto his face after years of being dressed up and paraded across…
The alt-country party line on former Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt front man Jay Farrar is that once he dissolved his partnership with celebrated mumbler Jeff Tweedy, Tweedy went on to blaze all kinds of creative trails out of rootsy strum-and-twang, while Farrar tended shop close to home, slowly honing…
