On any given night the Mink Lungs spit blood and spin hula hoops, preach hellfire and brimstone and perform death-defying stunts. Oh, yeah, and they’re a band, too. “When you look out and people aren’t getting into the music, sometimes you have to pull out the blood,” Mink Lungs drummer…
There was a time, maybe 30 years ago, maybe longer, when a guy like Joe Pernice had a chance. He didn’t need a big label, didn’t need big money behind him. He didn’t need a sure-thing single that the boys in the promotion department could take to radio, didn’t need…
What would you do if everything fell apart? Fight or flight? Accept it with a whimper or hold out for a bang? Attempt to pick up the pieces or start over from scratch? Pessimists–or pragmatists–may carry around the latest edition of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, but most people prefer…
You are either for Tindersticks or you are against them. If you are for them, you are very, very for them–and all you need to know about the band’s sixth and latest album, Waiting for the Moon, is that it follows the Trouble Every Day soundtrack on a breadcrumb trail…
Grandaddy’s 2000 album, The Sophtware Slump, dripped with millennial dread: Pictures of broken keyboards on post-apocalyptic dirt floors were strewn throughout the CD booklet. Tracks such as “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot” spoke directly to the times: “Adrift again 2000 man/You lost your maps/You lost your plans.” Grandaddy…
Have you listened to the White Stripes’ Elephant through headphones yet? I just did, and I can’t believe how sloppy some of it is: that raggedy-ass piano intro to “Little Acorns,” Jack’s guitar chug-a-lug in “Black Math,” the killer electric-piano blurts in the otherwise Queen-precise “There’s No Home for You…
Here’s a list of the top 10 things I’d rather do on Sunday than go to Ozzfest, with each item keyed to the Ozzfest act I’d most like to do it with: 1. Go to Home Depot and pick out new wall-to-wall carpeting for my breakfast nook (Ozzy Osbourne). 2…
The timing couldn’t be any more perfect, really. A week after Eisley’s high-profile tour with Coldplay, the band will headline Buzz-Oven’s pair of all-ages shows at the Ridglea Theater (June 21) and Trees (June 28). For Aden Holt, Buzz-Oven’s boss, it can’t get much better than that. (If you’re wondering…
Kelly Clarkson is like you and me in at least one respect: She, too, is sick of Kelly Clarkson. “My friends are like, ‘If I see you on one more interview, dude, I’m going to kill you,'” says the first American Idol, sitting in the conference room of the Dallas…
In “The Driveby,” one of several side-splitting skits on storied hip-hop producer Prince Paul’s clever new concept album Politics of the Business, Paul finds himself confronted on the street by a hyper, exasperated fan. “I did the worm, man. I used to breakdance, man. I fuckin’ popped, locked and rocked,…
You get the sense Dwight Yoakam’s still “country” ’cause he needs the hat and looks good in leather pants that end in boot points; otherwise he might have switched genres long ago, having tapped this one bone-dry. Not that Population Me, his first since parting ways with longtime home Reprise,…
What would happen if you found a bunch of slides from a 1977 McDonald’s corporate-marketing meeting and, in a flash of inspiration, turned them into a goofy song? What if you performed the song on a 1981 Casio keyboard, with your 9-year-old daughter on drums and your spouse showing the…
She’s a tricky one, this exile from the record bins. She tells truths, but never really makes clear whose, which confused those who loved her “honesty” the first two times ’round and alienated those who thought the third album too third-person to matter. (Liz Phair singing as a male was…
On their fourth album, Clem Snide shows they have a Soft Spot for the other side of summer, the mellow melancholy that creeps up on you at the end of a lazy backyard barbecue or the ash-end of a bonfire at the beach. It’s a narrow window of time when…
San Francisco resident Topher Lafata has the same bright idea lots of other former indie-rockers are riding these days: Ditch the electric guitars, mopey breakup songs and human drummers that the mid-’90s proved could be so useful and feed all that pent-up postgrad angst into the computer instead, sharpening a…
If, like me, you found yourself at the dentist’s office last week, desperately thumbing through People in an attempt to stave off the pain you went to the dentist’s office to experience in the first place, you might have read what radio DJ/astute cultural observer Rick Dees thinks of California-based…
In the May 29 edition of Scene, Heard, we related a story we’d heard a few days earlier involving Josh T. Pearson and Andy Young of Lift to Experience and a well-worn boot. We’ll let Young provide you with a recap: “This is it folks. Your chance to own a…
The home shared by Budapest One singer-guitarist Keith Killoren and keyboard player Chad Stockslager leaves little room for interpretation. The living room houses a few shelves dedicated entirely to the Beatles, and Stockslager’s bedroom is plastered with music posters, the most prominent of which feature Elvis Costello, the Who and…
Metallica needs an image overhaul the way front man James Hetfield needed to dry out. It’s been almost six years since the band bestowed an album of original studio material upon the world, and in the interim, Metallica has dropped dud after dud. Since 1997’s lukewarm Reload, there’s been a…
Mogwai’s music is a web of contradictions. A band given to grand gestures, yet the music finds its power in subtlety: delicate moments accumulate into something bigger than the sum of those parts–and then, for an instant, the bottom drops out. Multi-instrumental and dense, yet the wall-of-sound is as looming…
I’ve got absolutely no problem with the Y2K+ pop model of producer-as-star: Timbaland; the Neptunes; Jermaine Dupri; shit, Jerry Finn–these folks practically guarantee a good time, with high-level artistry an occasional fringe benefit and brand-name consistency a handy way to organize skipping around the radio dial. But the Matrix, as…
Ether Teeth is the second album of haphazardly assembled folk-hop from Fog, an alias for Minnesota solo act Andrew Broder. Glaringly apparent here, as it was on last year’s self-titled effort, is the fact that Broder is no revelation as a songwriter; he is, however, an adventurous manipulator of sound,…
