Listening to the first few tracks of Vast Low Cities, the debut release from San Francisco quartet Vervein, it might be easy to characterize the record as a collection of dainty down-tempo pop songs, enhanced by layers of ethereal female vocals that lull a listener into a pleasant, meditative state…
After two years of trailblazing work by incendiary artists like RJD2, Cannibal Ox, and label owner El-P, Definitive Jux has spent 2003 issuing work by the underground’s underdogs, hardworking MCs who have never earned their just due. As a freestyle animal familiar to New York heads, C-Rayz Walz falls into…
Where do aging pop-rockers with little cultural currency and a hankering for actual currency go when the major-label system fails them but selling CDs without the help of brick and mortar is still kind of complicated and stuff? They flock to them there indies, of course, where young acts with…
A veteran from the glory days of Blue Note Records, Jimmy Smith’s symphonic organ compositions have held a distinctly original space in jazz for a half-century. Smith helped shape modern jazz by copping solos from horn players and translating them on his Hammond B-3. Some keyboard players abandoned the old…
When an all-woman rock band sets up camp in the traditional rock ‘n’ roll boys’ club, it’s almost impossible to ignore the restrictive political status thrust automatically upon the band. Unless that band is Bella, a latter-day riot-grrrl trio from Mesa that doesn’t allow stereotypical dogma to strangle their creative…
The last time Jimmy Vespa and Bobby Lava Noxious did something they really didn’t want to do, they quit the Hypno-Twists, a band they helped start and watched as it slowly fell apart. Now the regrettable deed at hand is how to word the dreaded “Drummer Wanted” ad for their…
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Can Bob Dylan’s most enigmatic album be one he’s hardly even on? Like an absentee landlord, the masked but hardly anonymous Robert Z appears only four times to deliver a song and maybe change a fuse or two. Yes, it’s the soundtrack to his insta-cult film Masked and Anonymous, but…
From the department of “You can’t teach epic,’ it’s either bestowed on you or it ain’t”: In a single five-song EP, TV on the Radio has set up camp to scale an art-rock Everest whose previous existence no one but Björk fanatics noticed. Well, this expedition’s from Brooklyn circa now…
Simply labeling Los Angeles duo People Under the Stairs as old-school hip-hop heads misses the point. Thes One and Double K are more like docents at an imaginary Museum of Old-School Hip-Hop Praxis, a pair who deal exclusively with hip-hop’s basic building blocks — rhymes, scratches, and rare-groove funk samples…
Chingy
Chingy’s debut album rides into record stores on the strength of “Right Thurr,” an insanely catchy single full of chest-swelling keyboard melodies. It sounds like the inside of a strip club, spewing out snare effects and lewd drum patterns (inspired by the Neptunes) that twirl and clap like dancers spinning…
Boyd Tinsley, Dave Matthews Band’s buff, breathtaking violinist, probably could have sold a helluva lot of records had he simply released an instrumental album of virtuosic fiddle-dee-dee jams. In fact, when the annoyingly-redundant-yet-undeniably-talented band’s legions of frattooed fans first caught wind of the dreadlocked 39-year-old’s debut release, that is probably…
Yes, only God can make a tree, but only England can produce the rock stars who routinely plow into them. Or, when a tree is not readily available, an irate parking attendant. What other choice did Iron Maiden timekeeper “Nicko” McBrain have when he found himself late for a show…
Any emo-band front man who decides to bare his soul via the acoustic singer-songwriter route has much more to contend with than David St. Hubbins’ fine line between stupid and clever. There’s an even finer line between wrenching and retching. Fortunately, Seattle’s Rocky Votolato has the proper tools, primarily the…
Revisit the history of the Valley’s music scene, and in those annals you’ll find an anomaly: In 1996, four youngsters, barely in their teens, self-released (with a little help from the ‘rents) an eponymous debut, Chronic Future, which propelled them onto local radio and eventually to national prominence in the…
As Queens of the Stone Age’s crew preps the Lollapalooza stage for the droning stoner-rock band’s set, a silence falls over the Verizon Wireless Center in Noblesville, Indiana. It is July 5, the opening night of the 1990s powerhouse festival’s return to the national touring stage, and the sky is…
Club Next, a danceteria-style lounge in Old Town Scottsdale that embodies some of the stereotypes you might expect, doesn’t seem like an ideal joint for low-key Phoenix house DJs Pete Salaz and Senbad. But the partners found themselves there after changing priorities and schedules forced them this past spring to…
Perhaps this is the saddest commentary about the apathy of American popular musicians, or about the stranglehold corporate entities have on radio right now. The best protest songs in the wake of the Iraqi conflict come from a band of Welsh oddballs willfully influenced by late-period Beach Boys — as…
The word “punk” is like one of those pesky zombies in Night of the Living Dead: You kill it again and again, but it just won’t die. Punk’s death has been dragged out for the more than two decades since that winter of ’78 when the Sex Pistols dissolved. The…
Back in the day, jazz musicians had movements to latch onto, whether it was bebop in the 1940s, cool in the ’50s, free jazz in the ’60s or fusion in the ’70s. At the age of 28, Brooklyn pianist and bandleader Jason Moran — whose fourth album, Bandwagon, captures his…
George Harrison may be dead, but Americans can’t help but turn their heads, as he did, toward India for spiritual and artistic inspiration. While Madonna attends self-help seminars with Deepak Chopra, city-dwelling hipsters rent Bollywood features, and it all plays nicely into the hands of Rajinder Rai, a.k.a. Panjabi MC…
In 1983, Brian Eno released Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks with his brother Roger and protégé Daniel Lanois. It’s an ambient album about the moon they composed for Al Reinert’s documentary For All Mankind. Reinert’s film uses NASA footage from various Apollo missions, and the accompanying soundtrack shows three studio virtuosos…
