When vocalist/drummer Francis Mark moved from behind his drum kit to replace departing lead screamer Benjamin Perry, hopes were high that this Long Island quintet was going to delve further into the melodic side Mark brought to the band. The group’s latest effort, Holding a Wolf by the Ears, while…
For those hipsters out there who think Coldplay is too big to remain trendy, Guster might just be the band for you. Over the course of a decade, this Boston area band has built a surprisingly large grassroots following playing seemingly unassuming pop that reveals more with each listen. Ganging…
Backed by blipping beats and cybernetic synth sounds that owe equally to Deltron 3030 and Duck Hunt, Fort Worth’s MC Router dispenses a distinct vocal style not unlike that of a squealing 9600 baud modem. By her own description, the first lady of nerdcore spits “angsty lyrics” and “whiney rants”…
While recording his debut record, Chicagoan David Vandervelde spent two years holed up as an apprentice at Pieholden Studio, the Chicago recording space owned by former Wilco axeman Jay Bennett. Under Bennett’s tutelage, Vandervelde produced and played nearly every instrument on the resulting album, The Moonstation House Band, a catchy…
Let’s take care of a little business. In light of the recent Grand Widespread Panic Controversy, the powers that be here at the Dallas Observer headquarters feel we should make peace with the jam band’s fans and any other affiliated person we might have offended. In case you don’t know,…
Producers are the oft-overlooked wizards behind the curtain, pulling strings and pushing buttons, molding the shape and texture of an album. They are mad scientists and magicians, experimenting with techniques to record and manipulate moments in time, while remaining mere ghosts in the machine, a presence not seen but felt…
Chicago band Bang! Bang! calls itself a “sex rock trio” and offers up an uproarious mix of sleazy indie rock and dag-nasty punk that calls to mind Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Electric Six and Johnny-cum-lately cock-rocker Louis XIV. With tracks such as “Spank” imploring the listener to “take it like…
Gretchen Wilson, “Come to Bed” from One of the Boys Gretchen Wilson tore us a new one as a beer-drinkin’, shit-kickin’, Wal-Mart-lovin’ “Redneck Woman.” But aside from the hubristic drunk-driving anthem “All Jacked Up,” Wilson’s struggle to stay on the charts can be likened to fitting a size-10 hinder into…
The success of local hip-hop trio PPT is undoubtedly due, at least in part, to the group’s first official release, the contest-winning “Rowdy, Loud and Proud” Dallas Mavericks 2006 playoff theme song. But rather than enjoy the opportunities that song opened up, including their signing to Idol Records, the three…
Definitive Jux founder Jaime Meline, who goes by El-P, has spent the millennium battering hip-hop’s boundaries, and on his first solo CD since 2002, he takes things well beyond his previous extremes. The results are intriguing but self-consciously arty, engaging the brain more often than they move the body. El-P…
We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank seems most easily defined by what it isn’t. This isn’t The Moon & Antarctica, with its move from landscape and loss, from even landscape as loss, toward utter aridity. Dead lacks the blood-on-the-tracks freshness of the early work; this is not Interstate…
While Nick Cave and comrades venture out with their efforts in new band Grinderman, Mute has issued a double CD/double DVD chronicling the tour immediately following the release of Cave/Seeds’ Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus double album. (Abbatoir marks the first tour and recordings since Einstürzende Neubauten guitarist and core…
No rock-star kid ever made a more endearing record than Into the Sun, Sean Lennon’s 1998 debut, a Double Fantasy for hipsters produced by his Japanese girlfriend, Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda. Taking cues from Tropicalia, cocktail jazz and ’90s art-pop, Lennon’s lounge-adelic take on the sounds of the British Invasion…
TV on the Radio, fronted by Brooklyn artiste Tunde Adebimpe, is simultaneously progressive and regressive—a forward-looking throwback that’s defined by its ambiguity. Unlike all but a few recent albums, Return to Cookie Mountain, the outfit’s latest full-length, is less a collection of songs than an overweening sonic statement whose whole…
With the stoned cadence of Sublime, a self-deprecating sense of humor like the Pharcyde and that old-school hip-hop fun-time attitude, a band like Gym Class Heroes breaking out was inevitable. It’s amazing there isn’t one on every American college campus. But few would be savvy enough to hijack the chorus…
At 72, nobody still fucks with the Killer. On his recent effort, Last Man Standing, Jerry Lee Lewis goes toe to toe with, among others, Jagger, Richards, Springsteen, Fogerty, Robbie Robertson and Neil Young and comes out as undeniably brilliant and pissed off as ever. The new disc is a…
Recent benefit shows in Dallas have managed to draw larger crowds and better lineups than for-profit indie-rock showcases and festivals, which bodes well for Sunday’s NAMBLA fund-raiser. Skeezy Productions promoter Pete O. File, who is spearheading the benefit, knew almost nothing about the bands playing. But he had plenty of…
Mike Patton has said that Peeping Tom and its self-titled debut is his version of modern pop music. Fine. But pop as we know it and Patton have very little to do with one another so you’d be remiss to expect a KISS-FM makeover on the former Faith No More…
There is a woman on a makeshift, multicolored stage in a large backyard full of slightly scuzzy people. Scuzzy in the sense that they probably only take showers every other day, versus every day. Not hippie scuzzy, just sort of… San Francisco scuzzy. Not that anyone is paying attention to…
You could hear it all along 6th Street, Red River and South Congress: the dull roar of a couple thousand bands; bass and drums cranked to the max by sound guys who didn’t care anymore; block-long lines to see some British buzz band no one will remember in three years;…
“The first hip-hop record I owned was The Message by Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five,” recalls DJ Rob Viktum. “My father bought it for me.” When that record first dropped, back when Viktum was but a wee lad, it was mostly the inner-city kids who were having The Message…
This week’s contestants still believe that rock ‘n’ roll lives forever, but it might not always pay its own way. (Friggin’ freeloader.) Whether for amusement or pocket change, avocation or insurance, more than 20 years into their respective music careers, Rickie Lee Jones now owns a horse farm, Silos frontman…
