As captain of the good ship Built to Spill, Doug Martsch wears a lot of hats, and he wears ’em well. One most becoming cap reads “Resident Guitar Genius.” That’s the one Martsch sports most prominently on Now You Know, the first side maneuver released under his own name. But…
When producers Rob Garza and Erik Hilton, collectively known as Thievery Corporation, released their debut CD Sounds From the Thievery Hi-Fi in 1997, it carved out a place for slower tempos in a world dominated by pumping house and hyperactive drum and bass. Thievery’s signature sound — a catchy fusion…
For a guy with such an anonymous moniker, John Doe surely has an instantly identifiable style about him — that plaintive voice, at once folksy and underground urbane; a lyrical approach that favors the narrative with occasional flashes of pure impressionism; a minor-key, often profoundly melancholy mode of composition; and…
If your cheesy, green-beer-swilling, American version of Saint Paddy’s Day got a Mohawk and a few tattoos, then did a fat line of blow along with its usual bucketfuls of Jameson, it would look a lot like Flogging Molly. This band turns traditional Irish music on its drunken ear, incorporating…
“There’s a very cool geezer element to this record,” says Tempe-born Jon Rauhouse, referring to his new CD, Jon Rauhouse’s Steel Guitar Air Show. “It isn’t very much in keeping with what people necessarily think of when they hear the name Bloodshot.” There are plenty of other unique aspects to…
There are two kinds of cool. First, we have conventional cool — the preening, pouting and posturing that’s more show biz than rock ‘n’ roll. Say what you like about the Rat Pack, Elvis and the Strokes, but this affected cool has as much to do with their schtick as…
Afu-Ra is many things: father of two, devoted husband, hip-hop MC, martial arts student, devoted disciple of Haile Selassie. But right now he is a grown man getting yelled at by his mom. Tomorrow night Afu-Ra will be traveling to San Francisco, where he’ll be joining the High & Mighty…
At this point in its development, hip-hop is all about the marketing. Crossing over to the pop side of the street is incredibly lucrative, but doing so too overtly puts street cred at risk. That’s why acts and their labels are looking for new and creative ways to make the…
How indie rock got its groove back: Four D.C. scenesters listen to ZZ Top’s Eliminator nonstop for a week, realize its might but recognize its limits (narrow field of focus, reluctance to test goal-oriented MTV viewers’ patience, songs exclusively about body parts or carburetors) and set about retooling the formula…
Subtle as an amputation, the Residents cut themselves off from pop music’s tumorous body three decades ago and never looked back. Still as prolific as they are self-indulgent, the cadre of one-eyed malcontents — led by Mr. Skull — remains cloaked in deliberate secrecy. And while they proudly anoint themselves…
For the disenchanted boys and girls of early ’80s suburbia, the kind of kids who stepped into adolescence with alienation and dissatisfaction (and a protective layer of superiority) lodged deep in the center of their chests, the Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano was nothing less than a prophet. Now those kids…
If buzz sold records, Pinmonkey would be riding higher than the Dixie Chicks. Together for less than four years, with just one indie release under its belt, the Nashville-based quartet already has the critics in high soothsayer mode. “This band is a superstar act ready to explode,” raved Music Row…
On March 7, 2001, Valley virtuosos DJ Radar and Raul Yanez pulled off one of Arizona’s few great historical events in music history, the performance of the first movement of their classical composition Concerto for Turntable. On the stage at ASU’s Gammage Auditorium and accompanied by ASU’s symphony orchestra, Radar…
The wail is always there. The songs are plusher now. They don’t demand that you sit on the cold, hard floor. But somewhere, beneath what artists call “craft,” Corin Tucker’s voice conveys the emptiness of pure feeling. That alone is enough to keep Sleater-Kinney fans coming back over and over,…
The hair isn’t quite as big as it was back in the late ’80s, when moussed metal monsters like Jerry Dixon’s band Warrant ruled the airwaves and the concert circuit. “I think we look similar to the way we used to, just a little more hip,” Dixon, 34, insists. “You…
There’s something admirable in Darius Rucker’s mission to prove he’s more than the Dylan of the frat-boy generation. After years as the darker-skinned front man of the otherwise vanilla party band Hootie and the Blowfish, Rucker is branching out. With the release of his solo debut, Back to Then, he’s…
The electronica market is fairly glutted with attempts at Brazilian soul, and almost all of them are as skimpy as an Ipanema bikini. Relying on a scrap of melodics and a thin rhythmic string, these endeavors are usually way too polite to do justice to the exuberant complexity of real…
Ask anyone, of any age, to name the first album she or he purchased, and you can bet the disc mentioned will be cool: a classic that’s truly stood the test of time. And do you know why? Because people lie. Okay, maybe some of them are telling the truth;…
On its 2000 debut, Coldplay sounded like a band that took Radiohead’s “Knives Out” a bit too literally, slicing and dicing that group’s sound to bits, trimming away all the ambition in favor of sheer digestibility. Ironically, it only made Coldplay that much harder to swallow — especially with a…
It’s been four years since Girls Against Boys released Freak*on*ica, a weird hardwiring of indie-punk abrasion and big-budget techno. While that album polarized the band’s fan base, its new release, You Can’t Fight What You Can’t See, returns GvsB to the post-Killing Joke/Scratch Acid school from which it was graduated…
You’re always told to be nice to the people you meet on the way up, but you can’t expect the same etiquette to be returned in the world of punk rock. Take the closing night of the Vans Warped Tour, which saw a stand-off between the not-so-good folks of Pontiac,…
Nothing confusing about “real” — you either are or you aren’t. It’s like art or porn or funny — you know it when you see it, and you know it when you don’t. Like millionaire rappers talking about life on the street, for example. There’s something very unreal about that,…
