If you think incensed player haters restrict their animosity to large-living hip-hop stars, mentally unstable R&B songbirds and Fred Durst, you obviously haven’t gotten a swig of the Hater-ade currently being spilled online over these two unlikely outfits: Icelandic tone poets Sigur Rós and French-Canadian noiseniks Godspeed You! Black Emperor…
Trailblazing partners Missy Elliott and Timbaland function as musical time travelers, teleporting in every few years to show hip-hop what its future looks like. With their latest collaboration, Under Construction, the future might morph into its barely distant past. The album’s musical tracks begin with something almost blasphemous to the…
There are but a handful of Christmas comps worthy of being stuffed into a stocking; most deserve having a sock stuck in ’em, as they’re usually little more than label money-makers and time-killers stuck on a shelf in late October and thrown in the remainder bin come December 26. Especially…
Christina Aguilera’s problem has always been overcompensation. On her debut, the young waif was so eager to show off her pipes she mostly sounded horribly overwrought and warbly, like Mariah Carey hopped up on diet pills. On her sultry new second album, Aguilera is just as eager, only now it’s…
Jack Ashford, a hulking and dapper man whose smooth face, enormous grin and cheerfully deep voice make him appear much younger than 68, warms to his surroundings. “I feel the nostalgia in here,” says the percussionist, gazing around the room of exposed bricks that once housed a radio station’s production…
Alt-rock pace car Frank Black simultaneously released his seventh and eighth solo albums this summer, proving to Pixies lovers, two-track-recording aficionados and those partial to bizarre flights of surreal lyrical fancy that you should never underestimate a man who’s changed his name at least two times in his life. The…
Consider this a palate cleanser. It was almost three years ago. George W. Bush was teaching the world how to laugh. People were investing in something called the Internet. This column was called Street Beat. And we were fairly new on the job. Since everyone seemed to be caught up…
Mississippi’s 3 Doors Down make top-notch second-notch rock: “Kryptonite,” the big one from their debut, 2000’s The Better Life, married cleanly corrosive guitars, efficient rock-dude vocals, a Nickelback chorus that actually swung and a snare drum riff that made it easy to pick out on the radio. Away From the…
Not as revelatory as the 58 tracks on Volumes 1-3, not as revolutionary as the 14 spread across Volume 4, but more rewarding than its predecessors nonetheless since this marks the spot separating Essential Dylan and Disposable Zimmerman. Before Bobby Z. hooked up with his Rolling Thunder Revue, an all-star…
The debut record from former Soundgarden front guy Chris Cornell and the three Other Guys from Rage Against the Machine is here, the Rock Franchise finally rollin’ out the new IPO and branding strategy. There was a lot of political music biz dickin’ around while everyone figured out how they…
After listening to Tahiti 80’s Wallpaper for the Soul for the first time, I thought I had these guys pegged. They hailed from somewhere in Kansas, and from this middle American locale they were trying desperately, and obviously at great distance, to channel very specific frequencies of Europop. They were…
Within the dance-music community, everyone will admit to the towering influence of Paul Oakenfold over the industry’s direction and sound–some more grudgingly than others. Since starting his DJ career with the UK club night Funhouse in 1984, Oakenfold has helped elevate the dance-floor DJ from anonymous salaryman to bona fide…
Cody Chesnutt couldn’t be more sincere. It’s a typically hot July night in Hollywood, and he’s onstage at the Knitting Factory, halfway through “Up in the Treehouse,” a honey-sweet love song from his double-album debut, The Headphone Masterpiece. “Dream, dream, that’s all I dooo,” goes the lyric. “Dream, dream, about…
Mark Ridlen hates karaoke. He begrudgingly bought a karaoke machine two years ago because he was tired of having “some anonymous drunk” mess with his equipment when he was DJing corporate parties and weddings. He figured if they wanted to belt out “I’m So Excited” or whatever, they could screw…
Need a shot of pure Midwestern rage this week, but can’t find anyone willing to go see 8 Mile for the eighth time? Take your tortured ass down to Deep Ellum Live on Tuesday night, where Taproot, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Mudvayne, from Peoria, Illinois, will prove just how…
The new TLC record feels less icky to me than the last Who tour, but I’m not sure why. Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey explained their quick return to the road in July with a well-paid session guy in John Entwistle’s place as a tribute to the enduring spirit of…
At Madison Square Garden (Sony Legacy)
American IV: The Man Comes Around (American/Lost Highway)
Dressed in Black (Dualtone)
Kindred Spirits (Sony)
A comp of many purposes: to raise money for the War Child charity, which feeds the young and hungry in war-torn countries (baking bread in Afghanistan at this very moment, in fact), to celebrate 50 years of NME’s showcasing the tops of the UK-singles pops and to illustrate how today’s…
Talib Kweli has a welterweight’s agility, and Jay-Z has a middleweight’s saunter, but the rappers have claimed the heavyweight titles in their respective rings. After defining the parameters of underground hip-hop in 1998 as half of Black Star, Kweli has since dedicated himself to shredding those parameters, renouncing the asceticism…
Had a good time at last weekend’s North Texas New Music Festival, though we noticed attendance was slightly down. Not so much that you’d see if you weren’t looking. The actual numbers probably don’t even matter; the festival got more people to come down to Deep Ellum than anything else…
Writing about band names is one of the great clichés in rock journalism. Every group with an off-kilter appellation has an allegedly amusing or revealing (and often lengthy) story about how its stage alias was invented, but the majority of these tales are about as fascinating as a day spent…
You will never make out with one of the Donnas. Sorry. You’re a chump. Chump clothes, chump lingo, chump taste in liquor. Ain’t no way you’ll get your hands on these four bombastic California lasses, who’ve somehow evolved from a cutesy indie-rock girl group to an ass-kickin’, name-takin’ arena-rock monstrosity…
