Malcolm Middleton is in a good mood. This isn’t a big deal, really–except that as the brains behind Arab Strap’s music, Middleton isn’t someone you expect to find in high spirits. “Bukowskian bleakness” is the term often employed to describe the mood of Arab Strap, and from their very first…
Sometimes the version of history that never happened is as interesting as the one that did. No Thanks!, the new four-CD punk-rock retrospective from Rhino, was originally called the wide-open-to-interpretation Ever Get the Feeling You’ve Been Cheated? Was it a reference to the fact that the almighty Sex Pistols, whose…
It’s been a good quarter-century-plus since punk rock raised its snarling li’l head and slammed out those loud, fast chords and rimshots heard ’round the musical world. So, like, dude, time to grow up already, right? Hardly. As the folks who make Vans will happily (and profitably) tell you, punk…
For one thing, since I’m not actually leaving the Dallas Observer, just changing jobs, I didn’t really wanna do this. Writing a goodbye column, to me, feels like storming out of the room after a fight only to realize you left your keys inside and have to slink back in…
Even after four solid, gorgeous CDs, Ndegeocello is relatively overlooked by consumers and critics. This new album, marked by fantastic musicianship and pulsating sexual energy, should rectify that. Comfort Woman is a cool-weather disc, perfect for generating heat between lovers. It opens with an invitation, “Love Song #1,” in which…
Good luck putting Talking Heads in a box. They spent the better part of their early years building a revolutionary bridge between the art-punk tremors of the mid-’70s and the MTV overthrow. More impressive, their sheer popularity bucked convention, bringing an unprecedented amount of creativity and angry intellectualism to an…
Damien Rice may be the feel-baddest balladeer to find a wide audience since Volkswagen revived Nick Drake. Like his countryman David Gray, Rice specializes in putting the cold, wet feeling of Irish winter onto 2-inch tape and has a similar, if more astringent, vocal style. But Rice’s music is a…
It’d be an egregious understatement to say Pansy Division’s gay rock manifestos were ahead of the curve back when the band formed in the early ’90s. Way before Will and Grace and the Fab Five brought alternative men’s lifestyles to prime time, singer-guitarist Jon Ginoli was tearing through explosive queer-eyed…
With Where Shall You Take Me, Damien Jurado has pared down his craft to reveal a gift similar to Bruce Springsteen’s on Nebraska–the ability to render an old soul’s stories in a youthful voice. This is not necessarily Jurado’s own experience, but something deeper and darker and better-traveled. If his…
Guilt is a powerful motivator. We feel it whenever we spin Count the Stars’ Never Be Taken Alive, the baby-faced, just-past-jailbait New York band’s debut on Victory Records. Its sing-along rock, pop punk, splash-of-emo tunes are highlighted with riffs stolen straight from ’80s guitar tabs. But whatever guilt we feel…
Two weeks ago in these pages I called “Shh,” the unlisted closing track of Minneapolis hip-hop duo Atmosphere’s new Seven’s Travels, one of the year’s best songs about tiny-town living (or at least midsize-town living that includes drinkable tap water and syringe-free playgrounds). That’s true (I wrote it!), but what’s…
There are four reasons it’s safe to tell people you’re going to KISS FM’s Jingle Ball at Next Stage on Wednesday night: 1) All your friends are going, and you’ve all decided to wear the same red-and-green-striped leg warmers. 2) You’re pumped to see Hilary Duff in the flesh, since…
For the rest of us, language flows on a nonlinear yet generally straightforward neural pathway before it reaches our tongues, picking up a few personal significances and even trace bits of wit if we’re lucky. Every so often, though, a few people start receiving Valis-like transmissions from somewhere, which act…
This is a story of the little band that could. There are a few versions of this story, similar and by now familiar. Little band’s four-track demos magically materialize in the hands of so many taste-making buddies, who pass bad copies around like samizdat until at last some savvy label…
It’s not easy getting into Jay-Z’s recording home at Bassline Studios, tucked away on West 26th Street in Manhattan. I have to sneak in behind a woman walking into the building, take an elevator to the eighth floor, then knock on a pair of glass doors before a security guard…
As one of the 17 people who loved Sinéad O’Connor’s Am I Not Your Girl?, the Irish oddball’s much-reviled 1992 collection of big-band interpretations, I can’t in good faith begrudge teen-pop moppet Mandy Moore the opportunity to confound whatever expectations people have of Mandy Moore by releasing Coverage, a new…
As 1999’s melancholy suicide note “Adam’s Song” revealed, the boys in Blink-182 have always been more than just pop-punk pranksters delighting in fart jokes, masturbation puns and Peter Pan syndrome. The Southern California trio stresses this often during Blink-182, a drastic departure from previous albums that elevates the band beyond…
Imagine a world where rap-rock never existed. Don’t let the joy overwhelm you, but try to return to the mid-’90s, when kids began to donate their flannel shirts in droves, and bands such as Rage Against the Machine and Korn had barely gained a foothold in American pop culture. Now,…
L.A. power-popsters Phantom Planet and Australian guitar-strummer Ben Lee both know the value of friends in glitzy places: Until recently, PP counted as its drummer actor (and Coppola kin) Jason Schwartzman, hero to brainy misfits everywhere for his portrayal of Rushmore’s Max Fischer and most assuredly the reason the band…
There’s no reason you should like Leona Naess. After all, taken merely as the sum of her musical influences, Diana Ross’ former stepdaughter seems like a Frankenstein monster stitched together from parts of the Lilith Fair undead: Edie Brickell in the vocal phrasing, earthy-but-ethereal à la solo-era Natalie Merchant, a…
Texan rabble-rouser Charlie Robison’s hell-raising has been outshined lately by that of his freedom-fighting wife, Dixie Chick Emily Erwin; pissing off George W., though not hard, isn’t easy to follow. Still, Robison’s boisterous recent live album, Live, is not without its rough edges: In his brother Bruce’s “You’re Not the…
People call Duran Duran many things–decadent pretty boys, ridiculous new romantics, washed-up has-beens–but often overlooked is how their sense of savvy always superseded their savoir faire. The fab five rejuvenated disco’s slick beats with sleek Roxy Music- and Bowie-modeled art funk that made sophisticated rock palatable to teenyboppers. They also…
