In 2001, the unreleased album cover to the Coup’s Party Music, which showed group leader Boots gleefully detonating a bomb to blow up the World Trade Center, became a symbol of the post-9/11 debate between civil liberties and patriotism. Two years later, Sonic Jihad, the fifth album by Paris, the…
Sad and beautiful, the Handsome Family sounds like an eerie prairie wind knocking over a freaky-looking scarecrow. Singing about strangled women, insane farmers and blind men who hear angels whispering inside potatoes, this married couple of 15 years, Rennie and Brett Sparks, write lovely but gloomy songs that take place…
Kenny Chesney must be stewing. The cowrie shell, black-hat-wearing country star thrives on all things beach and Jimmy Buffett (see the song “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems”). For crying out loud, the guy’s new album is called All I Want for Christmas Is a Real Good Tan. So Chesney,…
Tattoos fade, piercings close, bad attitudes mellow — every punk’s gotta grow up. Unfortunately, the shoulders of the punk-rock highway are littered with the rusting remains of many a veteran outfit that refused to surrender their thrashy, sloppy, wanna-be-youthful fuck-all approach even after it had veered well into the caricature…
“Are you ready for more?” “Are you talking to me?” Just when the exported goods of New York’s renewed dalliance with the Trouser Press history of rock seemed to have expired, stellastarr* and its metallic brand of arty New Wave kicks off round two. Pretend it’s for the better, because…
F or the first time in 29 years, KISS’ Paul Stanley is warming the stage for another band. “Tonight we are celebrating life, liberty, and the pursuit of rock ‘n’ roll!” Stanley whinnies at Germain Amphitheater in Columbus, Ohio, on a recent August night, where KISS’ blockbuster tour with Aerosmith…
OutKast’s new album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, is a perplexing work. At times, it is sloppy and appealing; elsewhere, it is masterful and programmatic. There’s a circuslike atmosphere that infects it, a disease contracted from Prince’s overwhelmingly diverse Sign o’ the Times and shared by other overachieving acts like the Roots…
Okay, the hipsters in the reading public invariably know the Junior Senior shtick: one short, one tall; one straight, one gay; one skinny, one fat; one walrus-y, one indie good-looking (as opposed to model good-looking). They write slightly tinny, slightly wet Casio-disco-rock anthems about said topics. Every song is like…
Achtung, baby: I’m one of those soulless cranks who likes Liz Phair’s new record. A few weeks ago I argued elsewhere that the album’s four Matrix-produced songs “demonstrate how much room there is inside radio-pop sheen for actual emotional content” — particularly with regard to “the everyday compromises of single-momhood.”…
Like other Jamaican musicians of the ’60s, saxophonist Cedric Brooks didn’t choose to make ska, rock-steady and reggae — he got consumed by the dance culture that celebrated them. Brooks “always wanted to do the jazz situation,” he says in the liner notes of Cedric IM Brooks & The Light…
Thirtysomething R&B superstar R. Kelly stands accused of taping himself having sex with underage girls and collecting child pornography. Hard to believe any songwriter in that position would want to mine his libido for fresh material — and yet the out-on-bail Kelly has done nothing to temper the boldness of…
The Boston trio Morphine made a compelling argument for avant-garde minimalism in the ’90s. It relied on tenor saxophone, drums and especially bandleader Mark Sandman’s funky two-string bass playing. While the rockin’ 1993 album Cure for Pain solidified the band’s place among hipsters, its work grew more challenging and sensuous…
An old roommate once offered a thought: “Dude, is there any popular music from Germany that doesn’t suck?!” In thinking about it, he had a point — this is a country that made that Hasselhoff guy a performing god and presented the cranky robotics of Kraftwerk as its version of…
Slug, the rapper for Minneapolis hip-hop duo Atmosphere, bounces in a boozy strut, dropping dimes on the game and dismissing his fame, while making light of the strife he calls life. He takes a left where his peers go right, bypassing ego-rich self-aggrandizement because steady self-deprecation is his personal pique…
For hard-core hip-hop heads and regular patrons of urban clubs throughout the South and West, Jonathan “Lil’ Jon” Smith is not a newcomer. The Atlanta producer, promoter and rapper (if that’s what you want to call it) has been developing a style of simplistic but undeniably enjoyable hip-hop he calls…
The owners of Bandersnatch Brew Pub in Tempe have sold the downtown institution to the owners of Martini Ranch, Scottsdale’s upscale version of a white trash bar. It’s a done deal, which, naturally, for the musicians and patrons who make up the Tempe scene, is an outrage. The local enthusiasts…
Timbaland and Bubba Sparxxx are the new tag-team champions of rap. With Deliverance, the second Bubba album produced mostly by Tim, they’ve made the best hip-hop album since Jay-Z’s 2001 entry The Blueprint. The undying punch of their collaboration seems amazing when you consider how far they travel for their…
The Shizz’s compilation of local alternative acts This, to employ an overused adjective, is an eclectic one; and it’s diverse even if it doesn’t want to be. Some of the disc’s tracks move from instrumentals that sound like music composed for a Dee Snider horror film to strange, retro hybrids…
The White Stripes have reached a pinnacle. Call it the rock ‘n’ roll Peter Principle — a point at which their huge fame may not serve the music they play. While it’s refreshing to see a band this original and raw rise to an elevated level, achieve commercial success and…
An even greater mystery than Carly Simon’s “who’s so vain” saga: Which real-life metal band most closely embodies the fictional travails of Spinal Tap? Few hit pay dirt better than that German musical concentration camp known as Helloween. They’ve got it all — the brooding mysticism of Dio, the Reaper…
Billy Idol has a cult following. Ironic, eh? One quick run-through of his Web site documents a wide range of praise from his fervent fan club. Along with the photos of several female fans decked out in their “White Wedding” dresses, there are pictures of a 5-year-old girl posing with…
Irony is the alternative musician’s path of least resistance. Asked to describe the driving force behind experimental Brooklyn band Enon’s fabulous new album Hocus-Pocus, band member John Schmersal doesn’t hesitate: “We were trying to get back to having more time to watch TV and play video games.” Sometimes, however, irony…
