If you don’t believe that underground hip-hop is enjoying a serious renaissance right now, just listen to El-P’s brilliant solo debut, Fantastic Damage. Maybe “enjoying” is the wrong word: The oh-so-appropriately titled album doesn’t sound like it’s enjoying much of anything, save for the ruin of listener-friendly mainstream rap. But…
Modest Mouse front man Isaac Brock has never been reticent about his psychoses. He’ll freely talk of the demons in his head that speak to him, and allude to his confrontations with the devil. He’s something of a neurotic visionary, clinically sane compared to notorious alt-rock weirdoes Daniel Johnston or…
“This is not a film about Vietnam — this is Vietnam,” Francis Ford Coppola famously boasted upon returning from the South Pacific after the harrowing shoot for Apocalypse Now. The Cajun-metal supergroup Down can relate, having experienced firsthand the same drug-addled pandemonium that blurred the line between fantasy and reality…
When Florida’s DJ Icey throws on a record, expect forceful, syncopated grooves to quake from the bass bins, not the straightforward metronomic thumps most often associated with dance music. For Icey’s name is synonymous with breakbeat, a somewhat nebulous subcategory of electronic music that’s based on hijacked and often roughed-up…
Kori Gardner, 27, and Jason Hammel, 25, went to Tahiti after their wedding last summer, but their real honeymoon didn’t start until they got back to their hometown of San Francisco. That was when the duo, better known as Mates of State, loaded their Yamaha Electone organs and drum kit…
On the cover of his first solo record, Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections, Thomas “Cee-Lo” Callaway — flanked by a church-style pipe organ and wearing a psychedelic top hat — looks a little like a diabolical Buddha, or maybe a shaman, putting on a fun-house magic show. Light refracts…
It’s hard to pinpoint the particular appeal of Julieta Venegas. She’s sexy, sure — in a cute kind of way. She’s also got a certain artistic rawness — just two albums into her solo career, there’s plenty of room for growth, which makes her oddly vulnerable. And there’s that voice…
There are three standard reasons a rock act would refuse to do interviews: 1. The Freddie Mercury Royal Snub. This occurs after an artist gives unlimited access to a press community that still winds up vehemently hating him. Before the King of Queen stopped doing interviews, he granted an exclusive…
It’s about noon in Lawrence, Kansas, on a recent Monday — the day before the Get Up Kids release their first new album in three years, On a Wire. Get Up drummer Ryan Pope is not long out of bed, tousling his hair, bumping Dre’s Chronic 2001 and casually blabbing…
Whenever and wherever Junior Brown performs, you can bet your Telecaster that a gaggle of guitar geeks will be standing in front of the stage, their mouths wide open, drooling over Brown’s frenzied fretwork on “Big Red,” his custom-made guit-steel. The hybrid instrument, which combines an electric guitar with a…
Jerry Lawson doesn’t get rattled easily. Lawson, the lead singer of the Persuasions — arguably the finest a cappella vocal group of all time — has experienced just about everything the music biz has to offer over the last four decades: He’s made 21 albums, toured with Aretha Franklin and…
We regard the Breeders as perhaps you regard your no-account, jail-prone Uncle Bob — if he shows up for Thanksgiving dinner at all, you’re happy and relieved. Even if he’s wearing his pants inside out and drooling all over the table. Yeah, savor that image. Title TK certainly embodies it…
The difficulty with keeping it real in punk lies in the danger of repetitiveness. That’s where bands like Sweden’s the Hives come in. Singer Howlin’ Pelle Alqvist has got the squealing, hell-bound, late-adolescent shriek of Johnny Rotten before he went MTV, and the band grinds out a dozen or so…
Purveyors of the myth that trance music germinated in Detroit in the late ’70s or on the beaches of Goa, India, sometime after that had better hope that not too many Day-Glo-sporting members of the trance nation get their hands on Egyptian drummer Mahmoud Fadl’s new The Drummers of the…
It’s a sad testament to pop music that it’s arrived at a point where imitation is regularly mistaken for invention. There is little that music junkies love as much as easy reference points, and it seems the quickest way to curry both cash and credibility is to mine the familiar…
In Phoenix you can more readily measure the passage of time by the limited life expectancy of live venues than by the forward projectory of Valley bands. But there’s a group that started out playing battles of the bands, bowling alleys and matinee all-ages shows at the Mason Jar, where…
The Aereo-Plain cover photo looks like a close-up shot of a grasshopper, though it’s only a wild-haired John Hartford, wearing broken aviator goggles, going nose to nose with the camera. The picture could clear a field of crows, and the music inside — no less jarring — sounds like it…
It’s been three weeks since the artist currently known as Prince helped to christen the Dodge Theatre with a show that left the sellout crowd, well, enraptured. The three-hour performance by Prince and his band — which included inimitable alto saxophonist Maceo Parker of peak James Brown fame — was…
Rule number one for aspiring performers: Always know the room you’re working. After all, Ozzy Osbourne might be the self-proclaimed “Prince of Fucking Darkness,” but when surrounded by high-powered, tight-ass pols at the recent White House Correspondents Dinner, he was dapper and well-behaved, with nary a dove sacrifice all night…
The 1992 opera for which Alice was originally written has yet to reach our shores, but it’s hard to believe it could fulfill the promise of a playwright marrying a musician better than the album itself does. Kathleen Brennan has influenced Tom Waits’ music ever since they met in 1980,…
With Neil Young taking a shot at soul-man sophistication on his new one, someone has to make use of his godfather-of-grunge claim until he gets back to rocking. On his fourth album, Seattleite Damien Jurado, who made a sort of latter-day Harvest with his plaintive 1999 disc Rehearsals for Departure,…
They came out of upstate New York by way of Canada, Arkansas and other newly paved parts of the heartland. Calling themselves The Band, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson arrived fully formed and well-rehearsed in 1968, looking a bit like Jesuit missionaries, and Bob…
