There’s a vocal trait, a rattling scrape just below the words, that somehow makes every sung syllable seem sincere. Elvis Costello has it, and so do Alejandro Escovedo and Aztec Camera’s Roddy Frame. Minibar’s Simon Petty (how’s that for a British-American name?) has it, too. That vocal “realness” turns Fly…
When a venue goes out of business, it’s rarely a party. Unless, of course, the concert hall or bar or whatever has let its liquor license lapse and is forced to give away all remaining hooch. Free drinks are free drinks–just remember to tip your bottle for the homies who…
In his 1975 travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux wrote, “Bangkok smells of sex, but this sexual aroma is mingled with the sharper whiffs of death and money.” Terry Allen, already a renowned artist in several mediums, spent six weeks in Bangkok in 1984 composing the score for Amerasia,…
I once worked as a nanny for twin 18-month-old boys who liked to body slam each other and thought nothing was funnier than smearing my cheeks with food. I kept them occupied with squeaking turtles and whistling trains, but thank God for Steve Burns. As the host of the phenomenally…
There’s no pigeonhole big enough to contain Wales’ Super Furry Animals. Their last album, 2002’s masterful Rings Around the World, blended smears of everything from sunny ’60s pop to glitch-driven techno to death metal to tropicalia onto their big, orchestral glam-rock palette, emerging with a sound–utterly coherent–that could best be…
The Heavenly States’ debut disc is one of those albums that really makes you think. Not so much about the lyrics; those are kind of a dead end (“If you look/With your eyes/Do you know/What you will find?”). But–if you’re armed with a smattering of knowledge about the Bay Area…
Chingy’s debut album rides into record stores on the strength of “Right Thurr,” an insanely catchy single full of chest-swelling keyboard melodies. It sounds like the inside of a strip club, spewing out snare effects and lewd drum patterns (inspired by the Neptunes) that twirl and clap like dancers spinning…
His career in Guided By Voices now two decades old, Bob Pollard has, for most of that time, reigned as indie rock’s resident Captain Do-No-Wrong. The guy spits out records with about the same nonchalance (and frequency) of ballplayers heaving chaw. But if you believe his fans and starry-eared critics,…
The centerpiece of Shivering King and Others is, naturally, a song called “Shivering King,” which marches along to a swampy acoustic progression with a distinguishing, focused aesthetic. “From deep beneath a disturbing dream/Awoke the shivering king/The wise of the land/All were at hand/Can they explain what it means?” asks vocalist…
Sean “P. Diddy” Combs is many things to many people: shrewd record-industry mogul, sharp producer, shiny-suited bon vivant, inventor of the remix. Yet the CDs that bear his name suggest that, above all, Combs is a master of organization, of corralling the right people to the right location at the…
We were going to start by bitching about how three of the first five tracks on Ashanti’s bloated, boring new LP are skits and intros, but then we realized that the filler was less annoying than the actual songs. “I don’t want to be this woman the second time around,”…
We weren’t going to write much about Hollywood Records’ recent re-release of the Polyphonic Spree’s debut, The Beginning Stages of… . Swear. This is, after all, the third official issuance of said album in three years–the group put out the first incarnation on its own Good Records; 679 Recordings followed…
Late last summer, a pale, willowy young man walked into the vinyl section of a Denver-area record store. He seemed nervous. His glossy black hair fell like ink across his eyes, and he glanced around the relatively empty shop as if someone were about to run up and hit him…
When news that Chicago house DJ and producer Derrick Carter is rolling back into Dallas hits the streets, it spreads quickly and creates quite a buzz within the Dallas house-music scene. Where Carter goes, the party people are sure to follow, and wherever that may be, ass-shaking revelry is bound…
I called “Weird Al” Yankovic at his home in L.A. last week to talk about his new album, Poodle Hat, which includes a parody of Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” about constipation that I don’t like as much as Lavigne’s song, as well as a version of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” called “Couch…
It’s becoming quite the summer for high-profile homecomings ’round these parts: first the Dixie Chicks’ return to Dallas for a country-rebel victory lap last month at the American Airlines Center and now alt-country do-gooders the Old 97’s and young alt-rock hopefuls Eisley, both in town to help celebrate the ninth…
Songwriter and guitar virtuoso M. Ward (M. is for Matt) is one of those musicians people call a showman–the kind you imagine would be a natural at vaudeville if he’d been around a few decades earlier. Tom Waits is another one, and the two share an out-of-their-time penchant for sad…
Wayward electroclashers searching for a little tortured humanism to go with their silvery synth-playing and crunchy drum-programming could find a lot less to be excited about than the double bill at NextStage on Thursday night: Depeche Mode front man Dave Gahan, touring behind his debut solo album, the stylishly rumpled…
At first glance, Saturday Looks Good To Me is just another one of those thin-skinned post-collegiate music collectives who dress head to toe in Salvation Army chic and send 18-year-old tarts home to scribble in their journal. Gag me with a seven-inch, right? Wrong. SLGTM is far greater than the…
Since Strays, the humdrum new album by the reformed Jane’s Addiction, inadvertently emphasizes how much alternative rock has transformed itself over the past decade (and how irrelevant holdovers from the form’s premier era sound today), it makes a sad sort of sense that Perry Farrell’s newly revived secondary project should…
Many of you know Jeff Liles, either from his frequent contributions to these pages, his various local bands (among them: Decadent Dub Team, Group Six, Animal Chance and, of course, cottonmouth, texas), his work behind the scenes at a variety of Deep Ellum nightspots (Theatre Gallery, Club Dada, Trees and…
Sellout. Fake. Phony. Career killer. Catastrophe. Those are some of the words used recently to describe Liz Phair, the artist, and Liz Phair, the June-released album from Capitol Records. In the annals of The New York Times, Time magazine and Pitchfork Media, among many others, it’s been decided that the…
