Why do Euro-electronica acts tease us with sexy albums we can get down to, only to follow them up with moody, dark albums we can’t? Massive Attack did it with Mezzanine, the follow-up to Protection. Portishead did it with its self-titled follow-up to Dummy. Tricky, well, who knows where his…
Okay, this one’s a no-brainer. Australian Rock. What do these words bring to mind? If you say “Radio Birdman,” you need to take off your headphones and look outside. It’s 2001. Ditto “The Birthday Party.” And Nick Cave/Bad Seeds/Dirty Three haven’t lived in Australia for years, so they don’t count…
None of the musical underground’s ever-multiplying genres is so singly identified with one band as post-rock is with Tortoise. Since the mid-’90s, indie hipsters and cutting-edge types have indiscriminately applied the tag to anything vaguely improvisational, proggy and/or instrumental, but post-rock usually boils down to the experimentation of a handful…
As the plane broke cloud cover over Uruguay, 13-year-old Alex Han tightened his grip on the armrests.Sitting in his home two months later, Alex recalls the moment vividly; his body goes stiff, his thin fingers curl into claws and he arches his back slightly as he digs into the soft…
Some say that it really isn’t happening, that Less Pain Forever (a.k.a. Lush Budget Presents the Les Payne Product) isn’t really leaving Arizona, that all this talk about the duo living, recording and touring for perpetuity in a 1983 Chevrolet Southwind RV is just the latest in a series of…
The music industry is a joke. — Drunken Immortals, “Ambush” A&R men . . . bidding wars . . . contracts . . . demo recordings . . . promotional budgets . . . sales expectations . . . units moved . . . points earned per unit . …
While Valley stalwarts Les Payne Product will be saying farewell this week (see Payne-Less) with a show at Nita’s Hideaway, some familiar names will be using the concert bill — which features a handful of top local indie acts including Reuben’s Accomplice and the Slowdown, among others — to debut…
David Byrne’s post-Talking Heads career, like that of his fellow Heads, has been uneven, and decidedly low-profile if not strictly uneventful. But you gotta hand it to the guy: Never once does a Byrne album come off like he’s pandering to the popular taste. You might think he fell flat…
Stiv, Johnny, Joey . . . all gone, shuffled off to punk-rock heaven. Who’s gonna be left to inspire the troops? Billy Joe Armstrong? A wimp! Dexter Holland? A poseur! The lead dork from friggin’ Buck Cherry? Surely you jest! The recent VH1-Spin special on punk’s first quarter-century felt more…
Founded in 1994, the Chicago-based ‘zine Punk Planet, which won the Utne Reader Alternative Press award last year, has covered a music scene that’s inextricably bound to a progressive political stance. The voices in this book — musicians, political organizers, artists and filmmakers — make for some of the most…
At the risk of stealing an intro, let me count it off. How it happened was like this: Five years ago there was this club in Los Angeles called the Underground Cafe. The Underground hosted a once-a-week funk night dubbed “The Breaks,” at which a young hip-hop aficionado named Miles…
There are two kinds of people in the world.In the first camp are those who subscribe to the conventional wisdom that a solitary piece of tainted fruit is capable of contaminating an entire load. And then there are Donny Osmond fans, an optimistic (if grammatically challenged) clique who, like their…
If there’s one hard-and-fast rule about music, it’s that most bands simply don’t last. A couple years is an eternity in rock ‘n’ roll time. For a group to remain together a decade or more is a kind of outrageous anomaly. Most outfits either die out or just fade away…
Like everyone else, we here have heard the ominous rumblings, frightening whispers, foreboding rumors and the like. But in what is surely one of the seven signs of the impending apocalypse (for the others, see the Tool review in this week’s Recordings), we have confirmed that it has finally happened:…
All right, now, this bullshit has to stop. First Joey Ramone dies. Then comes word from E! Entertainment that Duran Duran is re-forming, in its original lineup. And a week after that, New Jersey’s Monmouth University gives Jon Bon Jovi an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. (To be honest, I’m…
The second album of R.E.M.’s Third Phase (end of First Phase: Document; end of Second Phase: departure of drummer Bill Berry) is not much different, and certainly no better, than the first, 1999’s Up, which should have been titled Down. It offers more of the same: pet sounds drenched in…
So, you want to be a rock ‘n’ roll star? No, you don’t. In a post-everything pop culture, in which stardom packs all the allure of a 4 a.m. whore and rock stars come and go with the frequency of a ham radio signal, what you really want is something…
Lurking somewhere in the dusty bins of your neighborhood record store — just after Sade but well before Scritti Politti — is a “new” album by the Sand Rubies called Cuacha — except that it’s really not a new album at all. It is, however, a renamed, repackaged and expanded…
Almost everyone can name some scene in some movie that left such a profound impression on the mind’s eye that it caused him or her instantly to become aware of the overwhelming power of moviemaking techniques, even if it wasn’t realized as such at the time. It’s especially the case…
I think G. Love is high.”What we do is just, like, American music. In this day and age, everything is one, and we just play music, you know what I mean?” Hmm. Correction: I know G. Love is high. “This is what we do, man. We just play this good…
There’s a chapter missing from America’s musical subconscious because we never embraced the Walker Brothers beyond a pair of brilliant ballads. That group’s enormous teenybopper following in Europe made it possible for Scott Walker to release a spate of eccentric No. 1 solo albums in the late ’60s, none of…
When rapper Talib Kweli rolled through Cincinnati a few years back, he met Hi-Tek, a producer who was a member of the rap group Mood. They collaborated on Mood’s full-length debut, 1997’s Doom, and have been tight ever since. Kweli enlisted Hi-Tek for both Black Star’s album and his own…
