Unknown, or at least underrated, Ted Leo swivels his hips like a young Elvis P. and sneers like a younger Elvis C. on Hearts of Oak, pounding the pulpit and sounding the alarm. Flipping through a history book while rocketing into the future, he still can’t quite escape what’s going…
January 31 was supposed to be a big night for the local hip-hop community. That was when Final Friday, the monthly urban music showcase put together by The A-Teem Alumni (Brian “Viz” Walker and Jonathan “Fatz” Dangerfield), would debut at its new home, Gypsy Tea Room, after a three-year run…
Damien Kulash is getting a little tired of all the questions about semiotics. Now, this is an issue you might expect from, say, a member of the Académie Française, or a Warhol manqué making silk screens of Osama, or Spielberg toward the end of a Q&A at Berkeley. But it’s…
In the opening cut of Kill the Moonlight, the latest celebrated release by the bracing minimalist rock group Spoon, singer Britt Daniel unreels the album’s central theme by describing a life lived for “Small Stakes.” It could be about any wage slave who “feels all right from Friday night to…
With the release of the Wallflowers’ fourth album, Red Letter Days, front man Jakob Dylan solidly lets go of his father’s coattails and begins to pave a path for future Dylans to explore, his own legacy. After the dim Breach in 2000, Dylan shows maturity and versatility exceeding his previous…
Aren’t Papa Roaches supposed to survive damn near anything the world can throw at them, up to and including all-out nuclear war? When these vociferous nü-metallurgists crawled out from beneath their Northern California rock in 2000 with their major-label debut, Infest, it looked as though that scene had produced its…
One could easily write off Bologna, Italy’s Forty Winks as just another group of punks with a number in their band’s name, tattoos on their arms and their hearts on their sleeves. But the comparisons to blink-182 and Sum 41’s juvy-punk (which are surely expectable and, on some songs, not…
Though he’s fallen so deeply in love with his own voice that he’s now unable to distinguish between pining and whining–seen the live video for “Clocks,” where he does a little ill-advised scatting over that glittering groove?–Coldplay front man Chris Martin has emerged as the New British Guitar-Pop Thing’s de…
Fans already have their faves–the 1975 original Broadway recording with Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera, the 1996 Broadway revival starring Bebe Neuwirth and Ann Reinking, the ’98 Brit-hits-the-fans disc featuring Ute Lemper and Ruthie Henshall–over which they argue in chat rooms and Amazon customer-comment forums. Of the three, the first…
“Try, try, try,” Billy Corgan moaned shortly before his Smashing Pumpkins turned to mush. If history is any indication, he was most likely imploring the Little Mermaid’s dad to turn him into a dolphin, but he might well have been talking to his future self: “Billy, when the Pumpkins break…
So here’s some news: South FM has signed with MCA Records. Apparently. See, one of the members of the band told someone on the Dallas Observer staff a week or so ago. But when we tried to verify the information with him, we got this: “Unfortunately, I will neither confirm…
To a certain fan of a certain subgenre of rock and roll, and certainly to any rock critic, there are few things in life more agreeable than the disagreeably somnambulant snarl of Mr. Lou Reed. There’s just something kind of relaxing about the deep, nasal croak that drones on like…
Let’s face it: A degree from a respected college is rarely a good credential in a punk’s résumé. The fact that members of the Strokes attended tony Manhattan prep schools is the loudest false note underneath their hype. And the diplomas from Emerson College and Brown University held by Slick…
Devendra Banhart’s debut is a mixture of song fragments, whistles, handclaps, chants and some of the most oddly affecting, full-blown songs you may hear all year. Recorded on four-track–and occasionally on ye olde answering machine–the music rolls out slowly and sometimes abrasively. Banhart’s juxtapositions can describe something like flesh in…
Red-headed Lena Katina and brown-haired Julia Volkova are t.A.T.u., two Russian teen-agers who may or may not be lesbians involved in a steamy underage relationship; 200 km/h in the Wrong Lane, their English-language debut, is scorched-earth teen-exploitation pop nearly as good as “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “Leader of the Pack.”…
Never understood why the Hives were the ones tagged as Your New Favourite Band (from Sweden, anyway), when The (International) Noise Conspiracy does virtually the same thing, only better. Actually, I do: The Hives play it Swede and lowbrow, hoping to move heads (but definitely not brains) by mimicking Mick…
They’re always lumped together (well, by Entertainment Weekly, anyway), and with good reason: They be Kiwi, got suck in the ’70s like Hoovers gone haywire and come bearing songs with “fuck” in the title (“MF from Hell,” proclaim The Datsuns; “Rocknroll Motherfucker,” boast D4). The only thing separating the two,…
Duncan Sheik could’ve been a contender. OK, maybe not a contender, but a guy with more than one great song inside him. “Barely Breathing” still brings back warm freshman-year memories, driving around with a girlfriend who wouldn’t last, wishing the radio played more stuff that disguised real songcraft beneath blandly…
Pardon Western Keys’ Ben Dickey if the Damage done on the Austin band’s seven-song debut has the same Bright Eyes and dark thoughts as Conor Oberst’s Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ears to the Ground. The singer-songwriter can’t help that he and Oberst both happen…
Since Aimee Mann fought the record-biz law and won, she’ll probably yankee hotel foxtrot through good reviews for the rest of her career. But along with all the what-nice-melodies-you-have that accompanied last year’s Lost in Space, critics dished out complaints that Mann sounded cold and unemotional, unmoored from some supposed…
Steve Earle is a political role model to some now, but that wasn’t always the case. Sure, he looked like he was doing something, appearing at rallies with guitar in hand, but he didn’t really care. Back then, this was Earle’s version of Getting Involved: “I rolled up in the…
In casual conversation, it’s difficult to nail just what made a concert great, especially if you’re trying to trigger pangs of regret in a friend who foolishly passed up an opportunity to attend. You can praise the vocalist’s operatic highs, recount the way three guitarists intricately tangled their notes, attempt…
