O.A.R., a five-man band from Rockville, Maryland, by way of Columbus, Ohio, is a jam band for the Napster age. The band, which mixes reggae, folk and agile acoustic rock into what it calls “island vibe roots rock,” arrived at Ohio State in Columbus in 1997, having already attained a…
Kim Nekroman, bassist and singer for Denmark’s punk oddities Nekromantix, barely seems to recognize the strangeness of the facts of his life. For example, as a former submarine radio operator in the Royal Danish Navy, he used to blast campy-punk icons the Cramps on the job. “It wasn’t that weird…
What bubbles through the veins of the online underground eventually trickles into the mainstream, and by the time the New York Times comes sniffing around, the trend is usually past its expiration date. Yesterday’s Brand New Thing is today’s forgotten fad. Seems like only yesterday we were praising Freelance Hellraiser’s…
When James Joyce published Ulysses in 1922, its effect on the literary community was incalculable. A sprawling tome loaded with nonsense words and run-on sentences, the novel could only be adequately understood by abandoning any pre-existing notions of fiction. Joyce’s prose operated with its own internal logic, and it had…
Geeky, hyperintelligent, and straight outta Brown University, white-boy rapper MC Paul Barman made quite a splash three years ago with It’s Very Stimulating, his debut EP. The record, produced by hip-hop innovator Prince Paul (Stetsasonic, De La Soul), was wacky, extremely original and very Jewish, and it won accolades from…
Perfecting Loneliness, the third album from under-the-radar veterans Jets to Brazil, sees the band achieve the state of grace that contemporary indie rockers crave. Former Jawbreaker singer-guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach heads up these ’90s pre-emo survivors, playing the role of the enlightened Gen Xer with a good bead on his relationship…
About five years ago, everyone was jonesin’ for that fusion of chilled beats, acid jazz and world beat simply known as “downtempo.” But much has changed since then. What was once cool because it sounded like French porn from the ’60s is now uncool because it’s like French porn from…
Rhett Miller, the voice of Dallas’ Old 97’s, has a new gig. Spurred by an independent, ever-rocking mettle, the front man of the alt-country powerhouse is Hitchhiking to Rhome via a new route — the solo circuit. While The Instigator, Miller’s first solo album, isn’t a dramatic departure from the…
In the last five minutes, after the microcassette recorder is turned off and the interview is over, Nate Ruess, vocalist for the overnight success that is the Format, predicts a humorous Behind the Music ending for the Valley band, equating the songwriting duo with the decidedly un-tragic demise of Wham…
Unmerciful and hella catchy, Westside Connection, featuring hip-hop superstar Ice Cube and protégés Mack 10 and WC, arrived on the scene near the end of the gangsta rap era in 1996, a last gasp of fresh air before the tired genre weezed in a hail of bullets. Bow Down, the…
Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise presents an intriguing picture. The band’s namesake is a black, sightless, former street musician from Detroit; his collaborators, by contrast, have always been considerably younger white musicians. You might guess this simply by listening to the music, which melds midtempo R&B grooves with rock moves that…
The Flaming Lips tweak your brain dutifully and gleefully. Whether it comes in the form of a car-stereo symphony, a four-CD set designed to be played simultaneously, or a concept album about battling pink robots, the Oklahoma City veterans have always lived to fry and fried to live, which is…
By now, hip-hop heads and Bay Area natives are familiar with the eight-man crew Anticon. The collective first turned heads in 1998 with a mildly engaging word battle between Sole and non-Anticoner El-P, as well as a slew of stream-of-consciousness productions — stuff that references the soul but mostly feeds…
Jeff Buckley is a rock ‘n’ roll Tupac Shakur. Like the slain gangsta rapper, Buckley’s posthumous pipeline outstrips his living efforts. Buckley, who drowned in May 1997 at age 30 while swimming in the Mississippi River, lives up to his image as a fragile man-angel on Songs to No One,…
Yes, this is the CD that contains “John Walker’s Blues,” the most misunderstood song since George Will discovered “Born in the U.S.A.” and decided, by virtue of its title, that it was a patriotic anthem. The cut is a first-person account of what made John Walker Lindh forsake America and…
Despite their name, Tokyo noise smiths Melt Banana melt frontal lobes, not fruit. Who knows what it is about Japanese culture that can provoke a response as extreme as that country’s thriving underground noise scene? Perhaps it’s the claustrophobia of intense overpopulation, a strong cultural conservatism, or all the artifice…
It isn’t every day you get to see a band react to its first piece of national press coverage. Oddly enough, it’s in Zia Zine, a free record store magazine and former local institution now assembled in Pennsylvania. After a friend of the band arrives at bass player Anthony Germinaro’s…
Hot Hot Heat, a foppish quartet from the tiny island city of Victoria, British Columbia, finds itself riding the wave of rock ‘n’ roll resurgence t hat thrust the Strokes and the White Stripes into mass consciousness. With a new LP, Make Up the Breakdown, released on the fabled Sub…
The late singer-songwriter Phil Ochs is often quoted as having said that the last real hope America had for a revolution would be if Elvis became Che Guevara. Imagine Elvis as some radical rockabilly martyr who one day decided to turn Graceland into a compound, surround himself with dozens of…
Upon hearing this marriage of band name and album title, folks may ask, “Is this some bizarre combination of goth rock and Brazilian tropicalia?” And the answer would be, well, yeah — and even more. The Black Heart Procession’s fourth full-length album marks an ambitious departure, and not just because…
Throughout his solo career, Peter Gabriel has walked a line ably between the accessibility the pop audience demands and the drawn-out artsiness his inner prog-rocker craves — recall that he fronted Genesis in its pre-“No Reply at All,” Jolly Green Giant-suited phase. His 1986 electronic pop masterwork So continues to…
Born in Tijuana, Fernando Corona lived most of his life in Ensenada, a small port town 80 miles south. He spent his early years playing all kinds of music, from acoustic rock to experimental stuff. Eventually, he became a member of Tijuana’s much-hyped Nortec Collective, that raucous band of musicians…
