Music

As a musician, one surefire way to get yourself on the charts is to plug a cliché sex idiom into your lyrics. It’s a common ploy, one that happens so often you sometimes just wanna gag. (That’s what she said.)Seems newcomer Dev is going that way with her single, “In The Dark.”…

Adulthood is tough on boy geniuses. Really: How does it feel to have peaked at 22? This is not to suggest that Conor Oberst’s some hack on the backside of his career. Bright Eyes is simply an example of indie cred’s Newtonian aspect (what goes up must come down), which…

For a group that specializes in smile-inducing string-band music that organically forces the heart to dance along with the feet, it’s natural that the Carolina Chocolate Drops would choose to face the issue of race by simply being truthful right from the start. Whether it’s their chosen band name —…

Though hardcore never completely disappeared, it spent plenty of time in the wilderness before its resurgence the last half-dozen years. The same might be said of Agnostic Front, bellwether of hardcore’s New York strain, purveying a gritty, no-nonsense, in-your-face style that echoed the grimy combativeness of their ’80s environs. Their…

35 Denton, the latest name for Denton’s annual pre-South by Southwest music festival, now stands as a much different beast from the SXSW day parties once organized and thrown by a group of Dan’s Silverleaf regulars down in Austin. Both conceptually and in practice, the festival has grown from an…

Mark Foster is living a modern-day fairy tale — albeit one with a twist, where the glass slipper has fallen out of fashion only to be surpassed by a pair of pumped up kicks and where swarms of hipsters make his dreams come true instead of fairy godmothers. His fairy…

There are plenty of bands that have their hearts in the right place, want to play music for a livable wage and not compromise who they are in the process. But unforeseen obstacles quite often derail these aims. Stories along these lines could fill a library. Lucky for them, the…

If you read much about the history of downtown Dallas, an unsettling truth comes to light: Deep Ellum, for the most part, has long been destroyed. The original neighborhood where blues legends Lead Belly, T-Bone Walker and Blind Lemon Jefferson made their names was specific — a stretch of Elm…

Each year, the lineup announcement for the annual Austin City Limits Music Festival garners some serious discussion, and it all essentially boils down to this: Is this year’s collection of talent a successful one, or will it all amount to a wasted weekend? Truth is, this year’s bill is a…

Ten years ago today, three days after the September 11 attacks, Clear Channel sent out a mass email to its over 1,000 affiliate stations. The email included a list of songs with lyrics and/or titles that Clear Channel considered questionable in the wake of the attacks. Songs on the list…

Musicians are undoubtedly influenced by the music they listen to. An artist’s musical selections can sometimes even foretell what a next album might sound like. So if you’ve ever wondered what the artists who grace your stereo are getting funky to, here’s your chance to find out. Every week, I’ll…

The fall season is starting to shape up as expected. The fall and the spring are, after all, the prime touring seasons, and right away, it looks like the Granada Theater’s got some pretty impressive bills coming our way.New York noise rock band A Place To Bury Strangers will be…

While there’s practically an infinite number of ways a band can generate great word of mouth for themselves in this age of social networking, digital distribution and the star-making blogosphere, it seems as though good, old-fashioned touring is as reliable a generator as any. Springfield, Missouri’s Ha Ha Tonka certainly…

I feel a bit sorry for the the U.K.-spring alternative-rock band Bush. They appear only in the footnotes of ’90s rock, sandwiched between the end of grunge and the rise of Oasis and Radiohead. There was a time, though, when they were huge. If nowhere else, you’ve probably heard tracks…