Second only to the party island of Ibiza, Iceland’s capital Reykjavik has earned a reputation in the last few years as the world’s hippest hangout. With 24 hours of daylight from May through July, all-night partying is deeply ingrained in this city, which boasts more artistic types per capita than…
Sleater-Kinney All Hands on the Bad One (Kill Rock Stars) Five years ago, back when Sleater-Kinney was just starting out, the song “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” gave the band a bold statement of purpose that couldn’t help but be noticed. Co-founders Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker made a…
Jamal Mohame Beledi (Self-titled) Jamal Mohamed is that most honorable of all curses — a musician’s musician. On top of that, he’s a drummer’s drummer. Meaning: He may be better than all the rest, but no one knows his name. But they should. Mohamed is the finest jack-of-all-trades percussionist in…
Blink-182, Bad Religion The old guys sitting on their porches are right: Kids these days don’t have any respect for their elders. Or maybe they aren’t right. For example, we have Bad Religion. With a career stretching back 20 years (to the — gulp — Reagan era), they are one…
Deathray Here’s hoping that new wave makes a comeback. Somewhere between machine-generated blips and the human emotions of songwriting, the ’80s-era pop style could be just the thing to help all those boy-band fans bridge the gap between the Backstreet Boys and Big Star, once their hormones settle a bit…
The Smashing Pumpkins What’s worse? A new Smashing Pumpkins album that provokes and experiments but ultimately comes up short, or a new Smashing Pumpkins album that just comes up short? With Billy Corgan’s much-trounced last disc, 1998’s Adore, the gifted, megalomaniacal songwriter wrestled with his mother’s death, the firing of…
For the last half of the 1990s, singer-guitarist Chris Briggs, guitarist Jimmy Smith, bassist Jon Turner, and drummer Colin Carter played together in a band called Check. As Check, they released a six-song tape in 1997 (38 Miles to Sucktown) and a 12-song album, All-Time Low, a year later. Check…
Scene, heard [DARYL] will celebrate the release of its debut EP, Communication: Duration, on May 19 at Club Clearview, sandwiched between Chomsky and Red Animal War. The band recorded the disc in February with The Paper Chase’s John Congleton at the controls, and if it’s anything like the four-song demo…
Everyone knew a kid like Bryce Avary. Some — not many, but some — were kids like Bryce Avary, a young rocker wannabe. A spiky-haired 17-year-old junior at Grapevine High School, he lives with his parents and younger sister in Colleyville. He’s an aspiring photographer and drives a 1972 Camaro,…
With short black hair, clean khakis, and a plaid button-down shirt, Jesse Michaels could pass more easily for a biochemistry grad student than a punk rock icon. Far from intimidating, he speaks quietly and laughs easily and often, a demeanor which belies the fact that, as the singer and main…
Last week, Texas Monthly’s Texas music issue (“The Stars! The Hits! The History!”) arrived in the mailbox, featuring Selena on the cover for the third time in five years. One of four covers available on the stands (the others feature Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bob Wills, and Lloyd Maines and Dixie…
No telling what pushed up the price of the Bobby Soxx “Learn to Hate” single that was put up for sale on eBay — the popular online auction Web site (www.ebay.com) — on April 20. Most likely, the eventual winner, who goes by the handle “jarosis,” was a fan, one…
Mazinga Phaser Dissatisfied Customers of Hallucination (Idol Records) Since Mazinga Phaser is almost invisible these days — no, I can’t remember the last time the band played, either — you couldn’t blame anyone for thinking it no longer existed. Meaning: I thought the group broke up around a year ago,…
MxPx Punk rock is a genre of music in which you can happily espouse the violent overthrow of the government and state (any band descended from Crass), a homosexual lifestyle (Pansy Division), womyn’s liberation (Bikini Kill), or any other kind of progressive leftist ideal (Propagandhi), and no one bats an…
It’s not hard to adore Terri Hendrix if one happens to be a fan of the best in singer-songwriters. The themes and words within her open-ended, post-folk music are rich with humanity, spirit, and inspiration, without ever verging into maudlin silliness. And she keeps getting better and better, each album…
George Jones There once was a time when I might not have been so quick to recommend a George Jones show. Not for any musical reasons, mind you: Jones still possesses country’s most stunning voice. Rather, the old George Jones was less than reliable, such a raging drunk that he…
Paul Weller Heliocentric (Island Records) It’s the great irony of rock and roll: No matter how old the audience becomes, the artist is expected to remain forever young. We go gray, soft, tired; we accrue mortgages, children, wrinkles, tombstones. But the artist must have none of these things. He or…
Sad sad me About two months ago, a member of The Nixons called us to ask why we had it in for his band after an especially snide reference to the group’s latest album, the appropriately titled Latest Thing. What exactly, he wondered, was our problem? (It’s not like he’s…
Scene, heard Cabe Booth, the local artist who’s painted all of the band portraits that hang inside Curtain Club, recently took on other responsibilities at the venue. Booth, who has booked the annual Fry Street Fair in years past, has set up a series of Thursday-night shows at Curtain Club…
If you judge a man by the company he keeps, it’s no wonder that a good number of discerning tastemakers see Buddy Miller as the bright hope of real country music. A thumbnail sketch of his career depicts a journeyman guitarist who has worked with an honor roll of roots-music…
Singer-guitarist Chan (pronounced Shawn) Marshall didn’t set out to become a rock star. In fact, it was by accident that she got her first gig at New York’s infamous CBGB’s. At the time, she was just up from Atlanta to play a small show a friend of hers had booked…
Sure, reading about music is no substitute for listening, but probably only a music book is going to show the typical Rolling Stones fan how Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters were the group’s daddies. Most likely it will be a Miles Davis bio that explains to a recent jazz convert…
