If you are one of the 75,000-plus people who bought Neutral Milk Hotel’s last album, the first thing you will think when you hear the Decemberists is this: Damn, that guy sings like Jeff Mangum from Neutral Milk Hotel. If you are like me, you will likely continue thinking that,…
Born of Bisquick, lumpy Georgia MC Bubba Sparxxx turned grits and good ol’ boys into a gold-selling gimmick on his 2001 debut, Dark Day, Bright Nights. But aside from wrasslin’ pigs in his videos and treating Skoal as a sacrament, Sparxxx’s actual music contained few touchstones to the Southern heritage…
The title of Black Box Recorder’s 1998 debut was England Made Me, and perhaps never before or since has an album title served so utterly and functionally to describe a band’s obsessions. Having lived in London for two years, during a period bracketed by the death of Di on one…
In showbiz, one measure of success is quitting–or at least threatening it. Sinatra did, and so did Dylan and Bowie. Even Celine Dion walked away for a while–if not for nearly long enough. So now hip-hop pit bull DMX, who’s every bit as melodramatic as the aforementioned entertainers, has made…
Nice as it is, there’s something a bit underwhelming about Baby I’m Bored, former Lemonhead Evan Dando’s long-awaited return to record-making (from wherever he was). Its lazily strummed folk-pop tunes–written and recorded with a diverse cast of indie types including Calexico, Consonant guitarist Chris Brokaw, Jon Brion, Spacehog singer Royston…
If I could get a look at the pages of Kind of Like Spitting dude Ben Barnett’s diary–the ones not detailed in his songs, I mean–I wouldn’t be surprised to find a handful of schemes to take down Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst: Though Oberst, in all fairness, has been making…
Say what you will about the ephemerality of costumes or stage names or the combination of a bald head and a really pointy goatee, but nothing illustrates the snooze potential of stoner rock (or stoner metal or psych rock or drug rock or heavy metal or desert rock) like a…
Everybody loves the Shins. No, seriously–everybody. Take Kevin, for example. All rippling, tattooed arms, head-banger hair and hell-bent-for-leather, don’t-fuck-with-me attitude, Kevin is the backstage bouncer at the Bowery Ballroom and thus something of a New York City indie-rock landmark. And generally speaking, he doesn’t like anyone, unless that someone is…
Super Furry Animals’ 2002 album, Rings Around the World, was very loosely a concept album about telecommunication. Or, more specifically, the vagaries of telecommunication–how, in a world filled with the low-grade buzz of infinite, free-floating conversations, enabled by a chain of fiber-optic links that no one save a few specialist…
From a distance, one could make a pretty solid case that the Dandy Warhols are less a band than they are authors of a chronological history of modern rock. Their first album, 1995’s Dandy’s Rule OK?, explored the 1960s drug rock pioneered by the Velvet Underground; they even titled a…
Jason Lytle has spent the past decade fronting Grandaddy, Modesto, California’s top-grossing indie-rock band. Before that he was a professional skateboarder. When you call up Lytle at his house in Modesto, this is hard to believe, since the proliferation of Jackass chic in recent years (and the persistence of my…
Never got to see Johnny Cash, and now I never will. I had a chance in 1996. I was living in Austin at the time, a couple of months shy of graduating from college, a couple of years from figuring out what to do after that. Never had any money…
Canada’s been getting loads of attention this year from stateside indie-rockers jazzed over ornate ensemble productions from “gay church folk music” practitioners the Hidden Cameras and extravagantly spaced-out guitar-popsters Broken Social Scene. Here’s two more acts worth your overvalued American dollar: Winnipeg’s Weakerthans and Toronto’s Constantines, passionate rock believers possessed…
Yo La Tengo is the sound of slightly nerdy brainiacs rifling through the racks of the hippest record store in town. You know the type–obsessive fans who always have the first line on what’s new and cool and often obscure, people who can also find the buried treasures on albums…
Last seen hereabouts a few weeks back as the prelude to Neil Young’s odd Greendale trip, Williams was aptly paired. Young’s artistic whimsy causes him to falter as often as triumph–the indelible mark of an artist at work–and Williams is now far enough along in her run to show a…
How good was Dwight Yoakam in Hollywood Homicide as rap mogul Isaiah Washington’s creepy bad-cop henchman? Yeah, you’re right, not that good. Half-convincing glower aside, Population: Me, the part-time actor/full-time honky-tonker’s latest, is another entry in one of the most consistent bodies of work in modern country music. I’d tell…
Chris Knight isn’t exactly the American noble savage, but like fellow Kentuckians such as photographer Shelby Lee Adams and author Chris Offut, he offers movingly detailed portraits of life as it’s really lived in Appalachia. His tiny, aptly named hometown of Slaughters (where Knight still lives, despite Nashville record and…
We are not the only ones who miss the late, great Robot Monster Weekend (“Geek Out,” September 4). If we were, well, we wouldn’t be surprised. The group wasn’t really around long enough–and didn’t play in front of enough people–for that to happen. But that doesn’t matter to some: “They…
The cowboy hat may be D:Fuse’s trademark, but his music hardly makes you think of Texas. Instead, his creations evoke such locales as New York, San Francisco, London and Ibiza, and visions of ecstatic throngs dancing in thrall to a seamless mix of energetic beats per minute. In one of…
Daniel Lanois, superstar producer and occasional solo artist, took pains in his liner notes to thank all of the musicians who contributed to Shine, his first album in a decade. These fellow musicians include U2’s Bono, sensual country singer Emmylou Harris, prolific session drummer Brian Blade, longtime friend and collaborator…
At this late date, only the acolytes await the latest Bowie release, the casual fan long having been waved off by slow sell-backs masquerading as Low comebacks every few years. He’ll never be as artistically rewarding as he was during the ’70s or as commercially viable as he was in…
Wildwood Flower’s liner notes are reason enough to recommend the final recording by June Carter Cash, who died unexpectedly from complications of heart surgery in April. Penned by stepdaughter and songwriter Rosanne Cash, they eulogize Carter Cash as a uniquely talented and loving mother and musician who for nearly 40…
