Critic's Notebook

The Search may be the perfect title for the latest album from Uncle Tupelo offshoot Son Volt, conveying the yearning, seeking quality that underlies the album’s indie rock-flavored mix and lyrical bent. In fact, it is long past time to bury the “alt-country” banner that Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy, and…

Where its higher-profile tour mates and pop-punk counterparts Simple Plan and Good Charlotte have coupled their massive record sales with face time in the spotlight, Ohio’s Relient K has taken a subtler route to the top, remaining virtually faceless to the rock (and punk, for that matter) mainstream while still…

At its best, Ace of Hearts, the U.S. debut from Danish quintet Green Pitch, lilts, floats, and haunts like the best work of Mazzy Star; at its worst, Ace is ponderous, awkward, and inscrutable. Dream pop is undoubtedly the band’s genre of choice, but folk influences abound. The opener, “In…

Good news for metalheads who are still living in 1983 — Age of Evil (whose members are half your age) is making new music that sounds like outtakes from Iron Maiden’s Killers album and Judas Priest’s Hell Bent for Leather. The Scottsdale quartet (composed of two sets of teenage brothers)…

Call him a poor man’s Dylan, or a wise man’s Clapton. Richard Thompson is perhaps the most underrated performer of his generation. For 40 years, first with Fairport Convention, then with ex-wife Linda Peters, and finally solo, Thompson has continued to produce terrific, thoughtful albums while others have fallen off…

Eric Clapton may have aged a bit too gracefully for many fans of his incendiary work with Cream, abandoning that youthful urgency in favor of a gentlemanly school of easy listening. And Back Home, his latest effort, clearly plays to Clapton’s older, wiser, less exciting side. As the title suggests,…

Priestbird — not to be confused with Priestess, Judas Priest, or “Freebird” — can be confused with Tarantula A.D. That’s the name under which the New York trio crafted its unique, enticing blend of classical music, freak-folk, punk, psychedelia, prog-rock, and metal before changing their moniker in recent months. Why…

Catherine Vericolli and Ryan Champagne might’ve dubbed themselves The Lucky Bitches, but the truth is that they’re quite the pleasant pair. Consider them to be goofballs to the third degree, as they named their DJ duo after a French & Saunders skit and incorporate silliness whenever possible into their weekly…

Most critics gave up on these horndogs back in ’68, when they had the temerity to boot out founder Al Kooper to get someone who could really shhhaaaang! The counterculture gave up on ’em completely when they went on a 1970 State Department-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe and had to…

A Club Candids without drinking? What could possibly make us want to go out besides the sweet promise of bars filled with bountiful booze? The biggest downtown arts event of the year, that’s what. This week, we decided to keep our livers clean and take in a little culture on…

After hitting up a couple empty clubs this past Saturday night, we finally gave in and headed to The Rogue in Scottsdale for Shake!’s two-year anniversary. Leave it to William Fucking Reed to steal the crowds, because on Saturday, February 24, the place was packed with a mixed mob looking…

As much as Kittie benefited from the late-’90s nü-metal explosion, they were always one smart step removed from it: From the scrappy, Hole-via-Cannibal Corpse death-grunge of 1999’s Spit, to the Pantera-style bludgeoning of 2001’s Oracle, to the finessed, goth-tinged chug of 2004’s Until the End, the all-female Canadian quartet never…

Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible is a dense, academic, and ultimately rewarding album fixated on questions of spirituality, religion and the concept of self — and, more specifically, how to reconcile these things in a bleak world where uncertainty is the norm, hope seems dead, and God isn’t exactly benevolent. (That…

Although Fall Out Boy lyricist/dreamboat Pete Wentz is inveterately verbose, his words don’t mask profundity, and that’s a big reason for his band’s success. A lot of emo acts have a limited audience because of all that freakin’ emotion. But instead of turning songs into platforms for pain, Wentz eschews…

Sex Change starts off re-exploring Trans Am’s journeys on the Autobahn, as the echo of Afrobeat guitars washes over the lull of a trance-inducing synth riff. But they move on quickly while keeping the synth front and center on “North East Rising Sun,” where droning psychedelic vocals tug against a…

Well, Lucinda Williams’ first release in four years won’t be making many people’s lists of Least Depressing Albums of 2007. Someone took her joy again. And this time, there’s no sign that joy is coming back, as Williams struggles through the heartache of her mother’s death while dealing with the…

This trio from Richmond, Virginia, includes singer/songwriter/guitarist Jacob Thomas Berns; Earnest Christian Kiehne Jr., a multi-instrumentalist who plays almost every folk instrument you can think of; and Sonya Cotton, who supplies breathy mountain harmonies. The gentle ambient folk music here spins a subtle web, and while the music is light…

Alternative Press included Moneen’s latest effort, The Red Tree, on its “10 Essential Albums of 2006” list, and went on to say that if you’d give your favorite record of the year five stars, The Red Tree would get six. Now, chances are, you’re thinking, “That’s just crazy talk.” And…

Few hard-edged punk bands were as blatantly pissed off about politics in the ’90s than Naked Aggression. Formed in 1990 by singer Kirsten Patches and guitarist Phil Suchomel among the breweries and cheese factories of Madison, Wisconsin, Naked Aggression’s original purpose was to protest the first Gulf War. The band’s…

After scoring two platinum albums and one massive hair-metal anthem (that ode to statutory rape titled “Seventeen”), Winger officially crashed and burned with the commercial failure of 1993’s Pull. And while most rock fans had written off the band, which actually rocked harder than most of its peers, guitarist Reb…

See ya never, Blonde Redhead! The top spot for bands made up of one sprightly Asian singer plus two experimentally oriented white guys has been usurped by Northern California spazzers Deerhoof. Last year was Deerhoof’s year. Finally, plenty of show-going indie fans caught on to what a few have known…