Music

First rule of parenting: don’t put masks on your kids that make them look like elephants.Apparently the parents of this little lady featured on the flier for local punk band The Jitters! didn’t care about making their daughter look as creepy as possible, as she’s donning what appears to be…

Adam Lambert has the vocal range of James Blunt and the Maybelline-boosted looks of a young Lisa Rinna. And that — combined with a man-on-man kiss here, an onstage pelvis-to-face grinding there — makes the American Idol runner-up a truly one-of-a-kind specimen in today’s hypersexualized pop music zoo. Critics have…

Electro-rockers Paper Tongues got their lucky break before they were gigging around their hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina — something that doesn’t happen often in the fickle music industry. Brian West, who produced Nelly Furtado’s Whoa Nelly, invited the band to Hollywood three years ago after discovering their music on…

The influential New York indie-rock band Versus, which made two highly regarded records in the 1990s (Secret Swingers and Two Cents Plus Tax), was last seen in 2000 and assumed lost forever. Now, the Merge label — having quite a year with consistently solid records by Spoon, Teenage Fanclub, Shout…

Sometimes these concert previews aren’t the cakewalk they may appear to be. It’s always a challenge to write with some authority about a band you’ve never heard of, especially when said band is a Tucson punk rock outfit with little presence on the Internet outside of the obligatory MySpace page…

Is it really so hard out here for a pimp? After becoming the first and only rap group to win an Academy Award (“Triple Six Mafia: 1. Martin Scorsese: 0,” host Jon Stewart memorably cracked), the onetime Memphis crunk legends seem to have done rather nicely for themselves. First, the…

As if they were the anti-Wavves, Brooklyn’s Beach Fossils wring from their kick-back, lo-fi stoner beach pop impossibly clean, intertwining guitar lines that loop and loop and loop and . . . Well, they loop to the point that, as you listen, you feel as though you were lounging on…

Mr. Fitzsimmons, as I stare at the blank Word document on my computer, I am determined to write about your songs. Not your Katy Perry cover and not your beard — as long and as impressive as the latter is. I bet folks write a lot about that beard and…

Semi Precious Weapons frontman Justin Tranter is definitely a party animal in the third degree. Poke around the Internet and you’re bound to find gossipy accounts of his after-dark exploits of drinking, DJing, and debauching with the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Kate Moss, and Perez Hilton. The androgynous and outrageous…