Last week we talked a bit about local musicians doing it themselves, creating their own shots the way Nick Van Exel does at the end of tight games. Or, actually, pretty much all the time. We were speaking specifically about some groups that didn’t wait for an opportunity but, instead,…
Finally caught the Pernice Brothers a year or so ago at a club in Memphis, a first-time-caller-longtime-listener visit written in pen and underlined on my to-do list as soon as they opened a “Clear Spot” in my head and heart on 1998’s Overcome by Happiness. But the show wasn’t quite…
Some albums shouldn’t be reviewed till they’ve been out a while; some need time to simmer on the digital hotplate to allow for maximum flavor to savor. Had this been written a month ago, when the advance arrived, it would have been waved off as too woefully flaccid to overcome…
The Gossip’s bassless counterparts, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the White Stripes, favor gritty blues flavored by their urban digs. But this Arkansas-via-Olympia, Washington, trio testifies as if it were at a garage-rock gospel revival fueled by Southern soul. Movement, their second effort, shakes mightily with swampy rumblings from guitarist…
No matter your feelings on droopy El Lay heartthrob Pete Yorn, give him credit for picking Modesto, California, oddballs Grandaddy to open for him: Sumday, the outfit’s forthcoming third album, is about as far as you can get from Yorn’s radio-ready pop-rock without risking the wrath of the droopy high-school…
Ready for three more so-so emo bands to separate you from your hard-earned eight bucks? Elliott, Vendetta Red and Mae, three of the so-so-iest emo bands around, sure are. Elliott drops in in support of the new Song in the Air, the Louisville outfit’s third album and its first since…
It’s the attack of the Earnest Guitar-Strumming White People! On his debut with the band that bears his name, the aptly titled Famous Among the Barns, Ben Taylor sings, “I am the sun/That’s all I’ve ever been since I begun/All I’ll ever been until I’m done.” But, people, it’s called…
Maybe you grow up backward when you start to play music. Running comes before walking; loud and fast come before slow and quiet. When you pick up a guitar, you have to learn how to turn it up before you can turn it down, have to see how far you…
In a perfect world, as opposed to a Bizarro world in which rock critics are American idols, the release of a Richard Thompson album would be Big News, cause for celebration; instead, once more, it’s a joyous whisper among cultists and the converted. Granted, he’s an acquired taste, like absinthe…
Watching Game 3 of the Mavs-Kings series (or as we refer to it: The Best Basketball Game Ever) the other night reminded us of the local music community. Specifically, one player’s performance in the two overtimes put the thought into our heads. Walt Williams–“The Wizard,” they call him–had been languishing…
The Booker T.-Berklee grad was Wynton Marsalis’ prodigy-acolyte, so it figures most of his dozen-album catalog plays it straight–real standard-time stuff, more or less, down to the Charlie Parker trib of ’95 and the tangled-up-in-string-section collection that was his last release. But Hargrove, all of 33, fares better when not…
Not since the Beastie Boys swapped Budweiser for Buddhism have party animals so suddenly embraced social awareness like NOFX, a band whose only previous foray into activism involved telling off feminists who denounced its sexist lyrics. Now, front man Fat Mike has discovered his inner Noam Chomsky: “I never looked…
Unless you knew Miss Cleo before the feds took her down, I seriously doubt you could’ve predicted Wednesday night’s bill at Gypsy Tea Room, or that some of your hippest friends and neighbors will probably be there, nodding along to the sweet guitar-pop sounds of Nada Surf and Sondre Lerche…
Ready for three more so-so emo bands to separate you from your hard-earned eight bucks? Elliott, Vendetta Red and Mae, three of the so-so-iest emo bands around, sure are. Elliott drops in in support of the new Song in the Air, the Louisville outfit’s third album and its first since…
Usually you can count on the radio industry’s annual rollout of springtime showdowns to provide a couple of jolts of life across the drudgery of the pre-summer day-to-day. Not this year: This weekend both KDGE-FM’s EdgeFest and the KISS-FM Party, each aimed at a different slice of the lucrative teen-market…
Coming across Dallas songwriter Max Stalling’s One of the Ways in the Texas music section of the local record store is like discovering a pack of Gauloise cigarettes in a truckload of Virginia Slims or a copy of Camus’ The Stranger in a box of Harlequin romances. By quietly breaking…
He thought he’d be dead by now, eaten up with the cancer that invaded his lungs and conquered his body. All he wanted, only last fall, was to live long enough to see the latest James Bond movie, Die Another Day, whose title he took as instruction. Warren Zevon revealed…
Sly hip-hop futurism touches down at Gypsy Tea Room on Sunday night with a triple bill featuring Barcelona-based beatmaster Prefuse 73, ex-Antipop Consortium oddball Beans and Tortoise offshoot A Grape Dope. One Word Extinguisher, Prefuse dude Scott Herren’s new Warp disc, is more of the meticulously microprocessed soundscaping he introduced…
We’ve broken out the short pants a bit earlier this year, which can mean only one thing: Summer, God bless, is already upon us. Either that or we couldn’t find any clean jeans. While that’s also a likely scenario, there’s more evidence to support the first conclusion. People’s 1A: If…
Whatever the Vancouver-based New Pornographers’ actual expectations were for their 1999 debut, Mass Romantic, it sounded like an album they recorded for their own amusement. Not that it’s lo-fi–far from it–it just emanates a secret mirth, as if they’d just invented a machine capable of tweaking TV theme songs into…
What with White Stripes a month on shelves, and the Rapture and Radiohead soon to come, 2003 is proving a year heavy on the “hotly anticipated.” Among these, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ first full-length, Fever to Tell, has likely caused its fair share of bated breath-related injuries, and now that it’s…
Last year, the skinny white English dude Mike Skinner convinced lots of skinny white American dudes that Eminem wasn’t the only skinny white rapper dude worth lending an ear; on his potent debut as the Streets, Original Pirate Material, Skinner countered the widespread American idea that Brits can’t rap with…
