Music

The Fray is easily classified as a purveyor of sugar-coated angst; on closer inspection, the band often provides more than slickly packaged emo tunes, with lyrics that tell personal stories (rather than generic words of love and loss) and instrumentation too skilled to be studio-doctored. The Fray gives a solid…

It’s a safe bet no one’s ever had a recurring Willie Nelson nightmare but me. Years ago, a song I’d co-written was being recorded in Nashville, and the producer, a good friend of the Ponytailed One, said, “You know, I can hear Willie singing a harmony on this.” For four…

Sure, there are plenty o’ emo droids out there whining about hurtful girls, hopeless work environments and self-destructive habits, but Armor for Sleep is here to tell you there’s something else . . . the afterworld, a place of never-ending moodiness where you have the option of either going to…

Sing-Sing’s debut album, The Joy of Sing-Sing, hit stores in the fall of 2002 amidst numerous references to Emma Anderson’s former, much-beloved band Lush. The music didn’t help, either, since it seemed split between multi-instrumentalist Anderson’s shoegaze history and primary vocalist Lisa O’Neill’s own folk-pop background. And I is much…

With delicate tunes and referential album titles like The Boy With the Arab Strap, Belle & Sebastian main man Stuart Murdoch is a cult artist who’s more or less birthed a scene of pop miniaturists, known as Twee. But whoever thinks it’s impossible to make pop music of the overeducated,…

RJD2’s two-track production cameo on Aceyalone’s 2003 album Love & Hate stood among that disc’s high points. Fans have plenty of reason to be geeked for a full-length collab. But while Magnificent City’s peaks are as good as expected — the Carter-admin gloss-funk of “Fire,” and the gritty Hammond B-3…

Can you say “mainstream”? Seasoned Phoenix-based rock outfit Fivespeed has officially grown up with Morning Over Midnight, an album packed with alternacore radio hits destined to top sales charts and incite rabid fist-pounding and panty-wetting on a national level. Fivespeed has in spades what mediocre nausea-inducing radio bands like Nickelback…

DJ Drez cemented his impact on the underground DJ scene in 2004, when he dropped his groundbreaking album The Capture of Sound, a whipped-smooth blend of reggae and jazz with hip-hop. Ordinarily we’re a little suspicious of white dudes with dreads, but Drez’s are long enough — and his message…

Doubling up on guitarists is commonplace in the metal realm, but Ed Gein is anything but ordinary. Maybe that’s why instead of having a guitar duo, the Syracuse, New York, grind-metal band opted for a trio of vocalists. Okay, so there are only three people in the band, but these…

For aging punks still enamored of nihilism but tired of playing all those pneumatic downstrokes, the allure of country music isn’t hard to see. After all, three out of four of The Ramones are dead, but those guys in Alabama still rise each morning to kick the shit once again…

My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult is the musical equivalent of stumbling side-by-side with Satan through a surreal horror movie on bad acid and rotten peyote. TKK’s influential 1990 album, Confessions of a Knife, opens with a track called “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan,” and the first thing the…

Man, I wish they’d had Roadtrip Nation in 1997, when I was fresh out of college and wondering what to do with myself. My roommate and I were scraping by from paycheck to paycheck with entry-level office jobs, and student loan payments on our overpriced educations hadn’t even kicked in…

Tristan Prettyman is difficult to categorize, even though most everything written about her blames her sound on beach party superhero Jack Johnson. That might have something to do with the fact that they both surf like it was a religious experience and perform their stripped-down acoustic pop with the same…

Looks are deceiving. Listen and you’ll hear classic reggae bounce and the toasting rap style of Jamaican dancehall, but glance at the album cover and you’ll note that Matisyahu (born Mathew Miller) is a Hasidic Jew right down to the broadbrimmed black hat and full, untrimmed beard. After initially rebelling…

Singing in a fragile, angelic falsetto, at first blush singer-songwriter Jeff Hanson sounds like folkie Suzanne Vega. But listen closely to the Milwaukee native’s two albums for Kill Rock Stars and you’ll hear familiar echoes of fellow onetime KRS artist Elliott Smith. Like Smith, Hanson’s ambling folk at times borders…

Of all recent cross-cultural collaborations, the pairing of Senegalese vocalist Julia Sarr and French flamenco guitarist Patrice Larose proves to be one of the most refreshing. Sarr, who cut her teeth singing backup for Malian singer Lokua Kanza and Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour, jumps into the lead role like she…