To be a Breeders fan during the band’s first go-round — as who among the ’90s indie-rock set wasn’t? — was to live in a perpetual state of frustration. Following a knockout debut, 1990’s Pod, the Breeders took four years to deliver the slightly less impressive but no less enjoyable…
Astute listeners with ears to the ground have called Rilo Kiley one of the best new American bands. The group’s reputation is ever-growing. Music journalists, having dragged their sprezzatura out to analyze the Breeders, Superchunk, or Weezer, have been known to skip all the way home to write reviews that…
Finally, there’s an album where getting religion and getting pissed off aren’t mutually exclusive. Songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and onetime Peter Gabriel discovery Joseph Arthur has made a treatise on faith and salvation that gives his demons their equal time with Redemption’s Son. Rarely proselytizing, Arthur seems angry and confused that he’s…
“So, are you going to fuck us over, then?” Such is Coldplay singer Chris Martin’s greeting, proffered with a warm smile and a clasp of the arm. Before assurances can be offered, he’s sashayed into his Los Angeles hotel room, where clothes spew out of a suitcase and over the…
Adam Jacobson is a big man. His goal is just as big to subvert the sourpuss patrol that controls modern rock ‘n’ roll and pump a little fun back into its veins with Steppchild, the viscerally enjoyable Tempe band for which he plays bass and sings. “It’s like the huge,…
Massive Attack’s slow-paced release schedule has made each of its albums a de facto statement on the U.K. dance-music scene: 1991’s Blue Lines ushered in trip-hop, ’94’s Protection and its companion No Protection introduced us to dub (not to mention Tricky), and ’98’s Mezzanine posited the group members as composers…
That’s not a skip on your CD. That series of harp notes, which tiptoe erratically and are disrupted by odd pauses, is just the weird programming that kicks off Neon Golden, a critical import fave by the Notwist soon to hit the States. The Notwist is a band of tricky…
Lou Reed’s interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe is, at more than two hours, an ambitious, often wild work, teeming with almost as many names from the New York and Los Angeles glitterati as Poe characters. Even though it’s decidedly odd, it’s also strangely successful. As Reed says, “It’s no longer…
Never understood why the Hives were the ones tagged as Your New Favourite Band (from Sweden, anyway), when The (International) Noise Conspiracy does virtually the same thing, only better. Actually, I do: The Hives play it Swede and lowbrow, hoping to move heads (but definitely not brains) by mimicking Mick…
According to their official bio, Ontario’s all-girl metal mongers Kittie are “setting new standards by hammering out honest metal music” a revolutionary notion since metal has never been grounded in truthfulness. How honest were Ronnie James Dio’s dungeons-and-dragons lyrics when the only castles he’d ever visited sold him square hamburgers?…
“We’re the Blare Bitch Project and we don’t give a fuck!” proclaims this band of pissed-off women, fronted by Blare N. Bitch of the beautifully obnoxious female metal band Betty Blowtorch, as it roars through the songs on its self-titled EP with the restraint of a dragon. The songs are…
Ah, payola, sweet payola, ’twere like you never left. Actually, it hasn’t, much to the chagrin of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin. Dating back to the 1950s when Alan Freed and other DJs took money to make songs hits, payola, as it’s termed, has taken on a new guise in…
“Hi, I’m Wes and I’m a musician,” says Wes Durham, the twentysomething bass player from local punk band Sixth Year Senior. He is seated among peers in the back room at Buzz the Original Funbar in Scottsdale. It is dark but quiet, aside from the occasional “test, test” reverberations from…
The poster is not the biggest-selling piece of Rolling Stones merchandise in Import Images’ online catalogue. Actually, it’s not even close. “I think the sense of humor in that one hits a bit too close to home for a lot of their fans,” reasons Patrick Smith, licensing director for the…
Avril Lavigne, growing pop phenomenon, had a great 2002. She sold millions of copies of Let Go, a clearly Canadian collection of mildly peeved kiss-offs that goes down like Alanis’ little pills without all the jagged edges. Her slightly warped tours with her band of spiky-haired “sk8er bois” drew capacity…
Now, I’ve never been one to share. But I’m an only child who became a music editor for a good reason. I like to be left alone, stand around at concerts like a potted plant, listen to records in private and then tell you why I think Bon Jovi and…
Naming your band after a poet especially a European one makes you intelligent, right? Yet there’s nothing overwhelmingly intelligent about Rainer Maria the Wisconsin indie-rockers that take their name from famed German “object” poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Too much has been written about Maria’s “articulate” rock by critics who are…
Those who think that only Woody Guthrie wanna-bes crowded the stages of New York’s Greenwich Village in the early 1960s should give a listen to Gerry Mulligan and the Concert Jazz Band, Live at the Village Vanguard. If nothing else, this newly minted reissue of an almost-forgotten 1961 release will…
Summer at Shatter Creek is the ultimate solo album. Not only has Craig Gurwich played every instrument and written and recorded every song on his debut, but the tunes themselves feel like they were composed in a room far removed from human traffic. You can practically smell the stale sweat…
Careers in music are seldom predictable, but Ethan Buckler’s has been weirder than most. He first kicked up dust among underground types in the late ’80s as a member of Slint, a Louisville, Kentucky, art-noise outfit whose influence continues to linger. The band broke up around 10 years ago, but…
James Taylor’s stab at “Everyday” was just underwhelmingly twee; Andy Bell makes the Buddy Holly tune full-blown gay, which is precisely the point, since few singers are so loud or proud about their sexuality as the Erasure singer. Erasure’s “Everyday” plays even sweeter than the original, but not so syrupy…
Shakira is intellectually fascinating. No, that’s not a pathetic last-call pickup line, nor is it a disingenuous way of disguising lust for the Colombian pop goddess (though that’s an entirely appealing separate discussion). For years a superstar in her native country, the young singer-songwriter refused to release a crossover pop…
