Music

Despite our holier-than-thou attitudes and go-down-with-our-Titanic-size predispositions, we rock critics love to eat our words. Well, as long as it’s us serving our own plates and not some yob bent on humiliation and revenge; the public pillory should be reserved for those musicians with outsized egos who really deserve it…

It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that Joan of Arc mastermind Tim Kinsellas is acutely peculiar, at least as far as his compositions are concerned. A random sampling of songs from Joan of Arc’s past three records would prove as much — from the “too smart…

Tristeza coalesced from the remains of San Diego punk bands that had burned themselves out, just as a black hole comes from a dead star. The sweet, viscous instrumental rock the band produces on Dream Signals in Full Circles, though, is as far from the piercing hard-core of the Locust…

“Kurt. Kurt. Look up, man.” With his dark eyebrows arched beneath a shock of freshly bleached hair, Chicken bassist John White is reprimanding singer Kurt Klinger, telling him to look at the camera. Klinger, quietly fiddling with the label on his beer bottle, shoots a goofy grin in the photographer’s…

Dilated Peoples rapper Rakaa (who also answers to Iriscience) describes the meaning of The Platform, the group’s debut, as “our stage,” “a soapbox” and “a street corner.” “We’re coming together and working and improvising and doing these things,” he explains. “We’re able to express ourselves individually and find a way…

“Hi, I’m John Wright. Uh . . . all these songs are copyrighted 1985, words and music by myself. Uh, conceptually, they form the songs for a, uh, rock video opera I have written in my mind. It’s set mostly in Hawaii and the Orient. It’s called Teenage Volleyballers.” When…

Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt’s book Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles’ Let It Be Disaster contains the sort of minutiae that gives a hard-on to the hard-core. The 332-page book, published last year, is less a narrative than an autopsy constructed from bootlegged outtakes made during the…

On West Peoria Avenue, a proliferation of “Going Out of Business” and “For Rent” signs dangles on drab storefronts like so many dusty postscripts to corporate will. The mom-and-pop shops that once were the lifeblood of retail sales in Phoenix are falling piecemeal, replaced by chain outlets and beasts called…

I have seen the future of pop music, and its name is Robbie Williams. . . . is I guess what we’re supposed to say after wading through this 50-minute valentine from Williams to himself, but Lordy, how it do fall flat. It might be taken as parody, I suppose,…

There are a lot of country-music geezers, alive and dead, who have carved their craggy likenesses onto hillbilly history in various ways, as men of the soil, men sporting braids or pompadours, in Nudie suits or cowboy hats. A vast 75-year parade of city slickers and kids from the sticks,…

A four-year mainstay of the North Carolina club scene but still relative newcomers nationally, Charlotte’s Lou Ford is one of those groups that charmed the critics outta their trees a couple of years ago via a low-watt but incandescent debut, Sad, But Familiar. The signature Sweetheart of the Rodeo-meets-Exile on…

Death Cab for Cutie makes sweet, even-tempered music that makes you feel warm and fuzzy — like nuzzling a big fluffy cat while bathing in the late afternoon sunbeams. Once you get past some of the more, ahem, cutesy aspects of the band (if you scroll hard through all your…

Long dysfunctional relationships can be trying for anyone; therefore, in the spirit of purging, it’s best to celebrate the conclusions when they finally arrive. Local indie-rock demigods Jimmy Eat World have celebrated the end of their tortuous relationship with Capitol Records by releasing two records that bookend the band’s current…

The difference between being trendy and being au courant is just this: For the former, you need only watch half an hour of television each day; but for the latter, you have to dig around and do a little research. The very phrase “Latin Revolution” as it’s applied to contemporary…

Lucky for us, the members of Radio 4 are a nice bunch of guys who just want to see you out on the dance floor exercising good judgment. Otherwise they might temper their propulsive beat manifestoes with irrational suggestions like “Donate your organs to a disreputable charity” or “Beat everyone…

“Yeah, we actually smoked a spliff with him,” says Supergrass drummer Danny Goffey of the band’s recent run-in with Al Gore during a taping of The Late Show With David Letterman. He’s kidding, of course; the Oxford, England-based band (Goffey, singer/guitarist Gaz Coombes and bassist Mickey Quinn) is known as…

Pay attention now. This is complicated. This was in Chicago, long about early 1994. Sam Prekop and Eric Claridge had been in a band called Shrimp Boat, recently defunct. Archer Prewitt was a member of the Cocktails, which had similarly disbanded. All three were friends of a guy named John…

Genuine musical objectivity is tough to come by, since most listeners, try as they might, can’t help but bring biases to what they hear. Sometimes these predispositions are personal; for instance, my beloved can no longer listen to the Beach Boys’ “Help Me, Rhonda” without displeasure, because it was playing…

Phone ringing. Jesus, I’ve come to hate phone ringing. After three rings, I pick up, and the raspy, almost timid-sounding voice of Balls shouter Tricie Soulos comes from the other end. “If I gave you a copy of our record, would you listen to it?” What a joy it is…

Bitterness, in rock ‘n’ roll, does carry some currency, particularly when you’re young and hung over (and frequently stupid) with a bunch of angst axes to grind. (Just ask Elvis Costello or Courtney Love — or Korn’s Jonathan Davis, for that matter.) As time moves on, however, one learns to…