Music

It doesn’t sound like Murder Time. There’s no screaming. No tension. No sign of a struggle. The opening track, “It’s One Thing,” starts off sounding like the kind of thing old prog-rock bands were doing in the ’80s — big, dramatic keyboards offset by the muscular chunkity-chunk of metallic guitar…

Before we even marinated our eardrums to Hot Concrete — the Drunken Immortals’ third full-length album that’s out to steal your mind with positive hip-hop vibrations and community-building lyrics — there was already word on the street that it was hot shit. You see, this seven-piece, live hip-hop groove machine…

Albums without lyric sheets can frustrate fans who want to memorize the words they’re singing and pore over their poetic meanings. But with Lambchop, it’s best not to worry about such specifics; this melancholy country-operatic Nashville collective led by Kurt Wagner has always expressed itself more sublimely in its baroque…

If the creepy painting on the cover of Xiu Xiu’s The Air Force is supposed to depict singer-songwriter Jamie Stewart as Jesus, it’s ironic at best: Unlike the traditional singer-songwriter — who plays a guitar and makes sense of the chaos of our lives by making sense of his/her own…

Not many kids can say their high school band touched off a major-label bidding war. But it was after leaving Radish in the lurch at 17 that indie whiz-kid Ben Kweller made good on the hype with Freak Out, It’s Ben Kweller, the first in a four-part series of increasingly…

Blowfly’s Punk Rock Party is so filthy Tipper Gore might spontaneously combust if anyone ever played it for her. The original nasty rapper’s new album is scandalous, obscene and hilarious. Blowfly, the 60-year-old pervert with a penchant for performing in shiny capes and masks, has been doing dirty for a…

Some musicians maintain legendary rivalries for decades on end — try getting Sting and Stewart Copeland to bury the hatchet and you’ll see what we mean. Very rarely, though, is a band’s epic enmity so huge it can carry a feature-length art-house documentary like 2004’s Dig!, which chronicles the Dandy…

The most Elvis-like country performer since Elvis, Dwight Yoakam established his cred as a country traditionalist when he kicked off his first major-label release with a spirited cover of “Honky Tonk Man,” a Johnny Horton classic from the ’50s. Two great albums later, Yoakam topped the country charts with “Streets…

A little more than 10 years ago, I actually proposed to my girlfriend at a Southern Culture on the Skids New Year’s Eve show in New Jersey. Why not, I figured — there was the onstage limbo contest, the fried chicken the band threw into the crowd, SCotS’ kitschy slow-dance…

While he might not be as famous as Morrissey or Johnny Marr, bassist and guitarist Andy Rourke was still a vital part of legendary English rockers The Smiths. Handling his bass like a warbling weapon of twang, Rourke added his distinctive sound to such classic Smiths albums as The Queen…

The best way to describe EastonAshe’s sound is “adult contemporary rock.” The Cave Creek-based band has a mature sound, audible in rich compositions like “Bayou Blues,” which doesn’t utilize the 12-bar guitar progressions in E major or A major like many songs labeled as “blues,” but instead features hand-clap percussion…

Massive Attack’s Robert del Naja, a.k.a. 3D, was initially known not as a musician, but as a teenage graffiti artist — yet his connection to Bristol’s underground naturally attracted him to the Wild Bunch, a DJ-driven sound system that paid homage to the Jamaican party-givers whose impromptu toasts helped birth…

This split CD from indie rock duo Less Pain Forever and pop/electronica twosome Peachcake begins with Less Pain Forever encouraging you to “Throw Yer Babies.” The leadoff track not only has LPF’s usual quirky synths and Zappa-esque vibe, but also contains lyrics like “The fire on the mountain is a…