Luscious Jackson Fever In, Fever Out (Grand Royal/Capitol) On their first two releases, the 1992 EP In Search of Manny and the ’94 full-length Natural Ingredients, Luscious Jackson’s four-tough-New York-women onslaught jumped and grooved. It worked, and not in a try-to-be-black (they aren’t) funkster wanna-be kind of way, either. Luscious…
Ginger Baker Trio Falling Off the Roof (Atlantic) You can take the drummer out of the rock band, but can you take the rock out of the drummer? On Falling Off the Roof, Baker explores that question once again, with bass compass man Charlie Haden and six-string cartographer Bill Frisell…
Smashing Pumpkins America West Arena December 7, 1996 Billy Corgan’s legs were slack in his shiny silver pants as he smiled for the first time all night. “I feel no pain,” the great Pumpkin informed a near capacity crowd at America West Arena. “I feel no pain.” Seven minutes earlier,…
His upper teeth are nearly gone now; they have been replaced by tiny slivers of off-white that peek through rotten gums. His lower teeth, thin and brown, appear ready to fall out if he so much as coughs too hard. His lips are pale and dry, coated with spit so…
Bush Razorblade Suitcase (Trauma/Interscope) First, Gavin Rossdale stole Kurt Cobain’s sound, right down to the last sad-but-fuzzy guitar chord and strangled vocal growl. Then he and his hired helpers rode it to a quintuple-platinum hit with Sixteen Stone, primarily because modern rock radio programmers were damned if they were going…
Seven inches of hard, black plastic, shaped to satisfy. The seven-inch record remains the driving force of the indie ethic–the only format that anyone with heart and scarce dough can afford to produce, and any gutter punk can “spare change” enough to purchase. The vinyl single is also a classic…
Van Halen Best of, Volume 1 (Warner Bros.) Warner Bros. has already released volume one in the Van Halen best-of series: It was called Van Halen, and it hit stores in 1978. Volume two, the following year, was called, well, Van Halen II; volume three was 1984 in, well, 1984…
In February of 1989, Billy Corgan gave me a copy of a self-titled, eight-track mini-release Smashing Pumpkins had just put out in Chicago. I was in a Champaign, Illinois-based band called Stark at the time, and we played with the Pumpkins occasionally. Smashing Pumpkins was a cheesy-looking cassette with hand-drawn…
Two band names have crumpled the brows of daily newspaper editors more than any others this decade. One is the Butthole Surfers. The other, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. In the first case, the cause of consternation is clear: No way can the word “butthole” appear in a mainstream newspaper, let alone…
Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Mark O’Connor Appalachia Waltz (Sony Classical) Arvo Part Litany (ECM New Series) Uh-oh. It’s force-feeding time at the music trough again. Every so often, a clever mind from the classical kingdom decides to shove pop ideas up the genre’s decidedly non-pop form. The results are often…
Curious, this half-page ad for upcoming shows at the downtown Manhattan venue Irving Plaza that ran in the club section of last week’s Village Voice. Curious not only because it advertises a super-rare live show by underground heroes S.O.D. (Stormtroopers of Death)–headlining a bill that also includes Biohazard and Unsane…
Earth Crisis has gone worldwide. When the commercial media finally developed a jones for stories on straight-edge punk late last year, they sought out and found a source in the subculture’s most prominent band, and stopped there. Result: Earth Crisis, one of the more ideologically hard-core straight-edge bands, was anointed…
I had a personal audience with Snoop Doggy Dogg scheduled once, but he canceled it at the last second because he and his entourage had just taken backstage delivery of several hundred dollars’ worth of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Snoop, who was due on stage in about 40 minutes, doesn’t…
Snoop Doggy Dogg Tha Doggfather (Death Row) Snoop Doggy Dogg raps the way Clint Eastwood acts–dryly but deeply. Snoop’s a bit more talkative, but his mostly impassive overtones–punctuated by spasms of spontaneous combustion–are pure Dirty Harry. The essence of Snoop’s message is almost subliminal, derived as much from the stomach-turning…
Tricky Pre-Millennium Tension (Island) From as early in life as I can remember until age 7, I had a recurring nightmare. Down the hall from my room, I could hear an ominous, gentle-but-steady drumming. Though I couldn’t see him, I knew the source of the rhythm was a little man,…
The recent jailing of Death Row Records chief Marion “Suge” Knight couldn’t have come at a more crucial time for rap music’s most successful and controversial label. In the aftermath of Dr. Dre’s defection and Tupac Shakur’s murder, and in the midst of a breaking influence and bribery scandal that…
Gene Autry Blues Singer 1929-1931 (Columbia) Aside from containing Gene Autry’s best recorded work–that is, those songs cut long before the Tioga Springs, Texas, country boy kicked his dirt-farm past to become the sort of sterile singing cowboy only Hollywood could create–Blues Singer 1929-1931 (subtitled Booger Rooger Saturday Nite!) also…
Susanna Hoffs Susanna Hoffs (London) Bad pop songs never die, they just get banished to remote parts of the world where people’s tastes are less developed. Thus it was on a recent rip to Finland when I heard the Bangles’ appallingly bad 1988 hit “Eternal Flame” no fewer than three…
Charlie Hunter calls his music “antacid jazz,” a jab at the legion of critics who’ve tagged his new-school stylings “acid,” which in critic speak has come to mean “jazz by young people in tee shirts.” Hunter certainly fits the profile–he’s sworn never to wear a suit onstage. In that respect,…
Henry Rollins Electric Ballroom November 16, 1996 Damn. I wanted to rip into Henry Rollins so bad I could taste a bloody scrap of his black Gap tee shirt on my tongue. Power Book ad-posing, 7-Eleven coffee-chugging, “Baretta” guy in better days, stunt-double-looking, Charles Bukowski rip-off bad haiku writing, underground…
“Supergroup” is one of the lamest, most cliched labels a music critic can slap on a band. The term conjures the image of conceited, balding, fallen guitar gods posed riding the cash cow on a reunion tour. Doubtless, Berkeley, California’s the Peechees will get the superdupe treatment by plenty of…
Various artists Shots in the Dark (Delphonic Sound) Oranj Symphonette Oranj Symphonette Plays Mancini (Gramavision) Inspector Clouseau may still be the anti-Bond, but the man who wrote his theme song has become the very epitome of stereophonic savoir-faire. Henry Mancini, the posthumous commander in chief of cocktail nation, won 20…
