For a bunch of trash talkers, the five thuggish, ruggish Scotchmen in Mogwai sure do make a heavenly racket. Rock Action, their new album, is the sound of post-rock quietly (and sometimes loudly) exploding, an enormous emerald-green cloud billowing out into the night sky and slowly obscuring everything you can…
That Bill Callahan’s musical pseudonym comes from an opaque cloud of carcinogenic pollution stirred up by the luxuries of modern living tells you what sort of mental state this no-fi nonconformist wallowed in when he started his one-man act back in the late 1980s. Smog’s early cassette releases and Drag…
When New Orleans dirty south B-Boy Mystikal left Master P’s No Limit franchise and returned to Britney and boy-band bopping Jive’s world domination pop machine with 1999’s Ghetto Fabulous, certain critical habitués expressed reservations. Skeptics felt it was the case of a young artist making a play for the show…
Even though the power-tool bludgeoning of Jim G. Thirlwell’s music may have some contemporary cohorts, it’s his peculiar brand of lyrical ranting that sets the now NYC-based Thirlwell (better known as Foetus, and all of its various permutations) in a world entirely his own. Imagine a crack-powered Eric Bogosian gargling…
Guy Berryman has just returned from Thailand, where he’s been on holiday for the past few weeks. That is where you go when you’ve seen almost all there is to see, when you’re in a band that has taken you to Italy, France, Spain, Australia, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Japan, North…
Neil Michael Hagerty has made a long and contentious career out of doing exactly as he pleases. His stint with Pussy Galore opposite Jon Spencer led to some truly chaotic moments both onstage and off, while his long-standing gig with Jennifer Herrema as Royal Trux evolved from a guerrilla noise-pop…
The Alkaline Trio is Blink-182 with the Promise Ring’s guilty conscience, the kind of guys who’ll break your heart before breaking the bottle, the kid next door who leaves flaming shit on your porch but makes mulch in the morning. So perhaps it’s no surprise that From Here to Infirmary,…
Before 1999, the riddle “What is the sound of young punks making new wave?” lay somewhere on the unspeakable scale between “Does anyone really think Julia Roberts can act?” and “Will Nader actually run for president?” The proof proved to be not as insincere as the latter nor as impious…
You ever score a sweet pair of shoes at a garage sale long after you thought everyone had already scored all the stuff worth scoring? Then you know what it’s like to discover Powderfinger and Ours. Both acts are emerging from completely different backgrounds–Powderfinger is Australia’s biggest rock band, finally…
At first, it sounded like one of the worst station promos ever, random snippets of familiar songs spliced together, the kind of thing most radio stations use to give listeners an idea of the kind of music they’ll be hearing if they decide to stick around. Only it sounded as…
Best band ever, if only for turning “…Baby One More Time” into the most poignant ballad of 2000; best band ever, if only for making “Killer Queen” live up to its billing. Yes, Travis is the world’s most astute and least finicky cover band–it renders the faddish timeless, the timeless…
Jonny Greenwood would prefer not to be here, this I know. Talking on an intercontinental phone call to yet another journalist about how great Radiohead, in which he plays guitar, is and how important Amnesiac, its new record, is in the face of the cultural poverty that’s replaced the 21st-century…
When most rock musicians turn 32, they’re usually either trying to think of ways to recapture the excitement of their early records or they’re considering plastic surgery. Not Johnny Dowd. Thirty-two is when the soft-spoken singer-songwriter first picked up a guitar, but even at that advanced age, the silver-haired gothic…
The chitlin circuit still lives on The Other Side of the Tracks–or, as an old friend of mine used to say, where the white man don’t go, that’s where the brothers know. Jimi Hendrix cut his teeth on the circuit before he used them to play the guitar, and it’s…
Los Angeles man about town Jon Brion’s the kind of guy you figure would probably be all right if the world melted while he was asleep and he woke up to find himself the only one left, doomed to an eternity behind the bars of his well-stocked home recording studio…
When is a local band not a local band? No, it’s not a trick question; we had too much to drink last night–by last night, we actually mean the last two to three months–so we’re making it easy on you and us. The answer: A local band is not a…
All right, now, this bullshit has to stop. First Joey Ramone dies. Then comes word from E! Entertainment that Duran Duran is re-forming in its original lineup. And a week after that, New Jersey’s Monmouth University gives Jon Bon Jovi an honorary doctorate of humane letters. (To be honest, I’m…
Usually at this time, people are too drunk to pay attention or too exhausted to care. It’s well after 1 a.m. in Austin, and the annual South by Southwest music festival is staggering to the finish line, limping along with a full belly and glazed, red eyes. Four days of…
I think G. Love is high. “What we do is just, like, American music. In this day and age, everything is one, and we just play music, you know what I mean?” Hmm. Correction: I know G. Love is high. “This is what we do, man. We just play this…
When you’re in a young band starting out, trying to get people to buy your debut album and tickets to your shows, this is how it goes: You’re doing an interview with a writer in one of the next tour stops, and the cell phone you’re using won’t cooperate. The…
Four summers ago at Deep Ellum Live, the frustrated disappointment of the scattered fans was a pitch louder than the electronic bird sounds and shimmers coming from Rickie Lee Jones’ accompanists as she spun around onstage amid candles and lamps. She’d pause at the microphone now and again to slur…
Maybe our memory is failing us a little bit, but we’d swear Lift to Experience started working on its debut, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, more than three years ago. However many years it took, it was long enough for the band to completely record and scrap one version of Crossroads and…
