Music

Friday night’s show at Rubber Gloves featured one of the best local bills I’ve caught this year. An album-release show for Teenage Cool Kids’ Foreign Lands, the evening also featured Cleburne’s Fungi Girls and, more importantly, the phenomenal debut performance by Denton-based Brit-punk/hardcore act Video. Formed just three weeks ago,…

Warped Tour at Superpages.com Center on Sunday, July 5Anti-Flag, Bad Religion and Less Than Jake headlined the 15th annual Warped Tour. For $40, it offered something for all types of Hot Topic-clad teenage rockers, from the roots of punk to the MySpace man of glamour, Jeffree Star. That’s fierce…..

So, first and foremost: Happy (almost) Fourth of July, everyone! Now, let’s talk about the weekend in music, per protocol. As always, the stuff we already discussed up first.Tonight’s pretty busy, actually: Asylum Street Spankers, Porterdavis and The O’s play the Granada; The Edge gets the 20th Anniversary treatment at…

It might not have the editing chops of say, their labelmates’ tour doc, but there’s a certain charm to the above clip that sums up Smile Smile’s tour with Metric and Sebastien Grainger–just as there is with all things the band does, I guess. Anyway, check it out–especially the part…

Fort Worth’s Pixies acolytes, The Cut*Off have a new video promoting the first single from their upcoming disc–and, it’s a whole lot more on the alt-country side than the Pixies side of things. And that’s perfectly OK, ’cause the song, especially when set to the above Schoolhouse Rock-appropriated clip, makes…

The biggest gripe—if there’s one worth having—with THe BAcksliders’ 2008 release, You’re Welcome, was that it didn’t showcase the band’s best side; for whatever reason, the disc found the long-running, hard-partying area rock act’s classic, gritty blues-rock sound pushed aside in favor of a more New Wave-y, poppy sound. It…

Patrick Meese’s friendship with fellow The Fray’s Isaac Slade was handy from a getting-noticed standpoint. But now that the also Denver-based Meese’s namesake band is receiving the major-label-release treatment, Broadcast will undoubtedly be viewed through a Fray-ed prism—and that brings minuses along with pluses. Heavily pianistic tracks like “Taking the…

Other than his insistence on giving his projects ridiculous monikers, Montreal singer-songwriter Spencer Krug can’t seem to do much wrong in recent years. His main band, Wolf Parade, had one of 2008’s strongest albums (At Mount Zoomer), and his primary side project, Sunset Rubdown, has put together a string of…

Abe Vigoda’s lower-profile triumph last year affirmed what most Southern Californians already knew: Los Angeles is in no danger of running out of good ideas—and they’re all still wafting out of a dirty old alley. Technically, Abe Vigoda’s young cadre hails from Chino, but the quartet has long been associated…

Superficially, Asylum Street Spankers appears to be two things it is not: neo-/retro-pre-rock ‘n’ roll pop/swing/whatever (remember that Lounge Nation rag from the ’90s?) and a zany band that does “jokey songs” (remember the Dead Milkmen and Weird Al Yankowhasis?). Wrong. While these Austinites perform ancient tunes and originals written…

When, back in April, we first made mention on our blog of George Gimarc’s intention of honoring KDGE FM’s 20th anniversary with a shindig at the Lakewood Theater, one commentor noted that “the occasion only invites more tales of regret and lost opportunity.” Amen, brother. Because The Edge being feted…

Dirt Nasty has become something of a YouTube sensation with his absurdly profane lyrics and equally ridiculous videos. Although his given name, Simon Rex, may not be immediately familiar to most, he’s probably been in at least a few movies you’ve seen. Or perhaps you remember his stint as a…