The best Album Leaf album, Seal Beach, distinguished itself in two ways: The songs were all instrumentals, and the record was only an EP. On his subsequent full-length efforts, The Album Leaf’s Jimmy LaValle has further cultivated an introspective, expansive style of tranquil electronica, but the discs’ longer running times…
Gnawing your way through the latest Mars Volta record is always something of a chore at first. The band, anchored by instrumentalist/composer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and lyricist/vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala, turns out huge mind-fucks as songs, mixing prog-metal, psychedelia, and swaggering Latin flavors into massive, album-long narratives whose intent is to confound…
Trucks of the United Nations, you’re on notice — Dave Mustaine, guitarist/singer/czar of Megadeth, is calling you out. “I was watching TV and saw the trucks that said ‘U.N.’ on them and said, ‘Man, you are so uncool, ineffective, anything,'” Mustaine said in a recent Billboard interview. And if Mustaine’s…
Is Hank Williams III smoking crack, or are Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers truly, as III suggests, “the best damn band in America”? We have no firsthand knowledge, as it turns out, of what Mr. Williams does when he’s not making music, but we do know this: Th’ Shack Shakers have…
Van Morrison first made a name for himself at the helm of The Angry Young Them, as an Irish Eric Burdon blowing harp and spitting out the blues with a gritty authority that said he’d kick your ass if he were any taller. The liner notes in that first album…
It’s been 50 years since James Brown’s first professional recording, “Please Please Please,” became the first million-seller in one of American music’s most inspiring careers. But while the yearning desperation of his early ballads proved the kid could more than hold his own against the other soul greats, it was…
Wayne “The Train” Hancock likes to swing. Every night, he gathers up his three-piece barnstormers and travels the highways, serving up his mixture of hillbilly swing, rockabilly, and hardcore Hank Sr. honky-tonk, the sort of stuff that sends people to two-step programs at Hillbillies Anonymous. “I don’t get it,” Hancock…
As with any hyped-up, talked-about newcomer on a monolithic mega-label like Sony, you have to ask yourself some good, hard questions about Matthew “Matisyahu” Miller. Specifically, will attendance at his live performance be for the music, or for the sheer spectacle of seeing a fully bearded Hasidic Jew strutting and…
Conservative Christianity and post-hardcore scree may seem like the most disparate of extremes, but the post-metal sextet Asperity has that juxtaposition beat. Asperity is tight and professional, and 5/6ths of its members are only juniors in high school. With an average age of 17, the Peoria-based “nü Christian” pummelcore band…
“I’m rich and famous/With a million-dollar contract/But it’s not around,” Monstrous guitarist/singer Led Gethway brags disingenuously over the luscious, distorto-scour psych of “Rich & Famous.” Too old to be Hanson’s grunge-punk successors but less slickly presented and pointedly generic than, say, Silverchair, Led Gethway and his brothers Ken and Alex…
When the old Sail Inn closed its doors late last year, Tempe scenesters shed plenty of collective tears as one of their favorite hangouts went kaput. Now the drinking den has been reborn as Trax, a “casual but trendy” nightspot with a posh interior, 14-foot video wall, and lineup of…
It’s not exactly like unraveling there’s no Santa Claus, but it’s not unlike it, either. When a friend tells you about a three-day festival of stoner rock and doom metal and mentions that the organizer is a guy by the name of Ancient Rob, your thoughts naturally gravitate toward the…
Don’t even mention the words “dead horse” to Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Rickey Medlocke — he gets pissed. Making it perfectly clear that the current incarnation of the iconic Southern rock band that brought us “Free Bird” is no knockoff, Medlocke vehemently issues a challenge to any naysayers. “For anyone who…
Considering the haunted after-hours vibe he kept returning to on last year’s critically acclaimed Forever Hasn’t Happened Yet, it may seem strange to find John Doe reissuing the far more raucous For the Rest of Us, a little-heard EP from 1998, as For the Best of Us, its outtakes only…
Corey Parks is like a bad-ass biker broad wielding a fierce four-string. The trashy, inked-up bassist has always struck an intimidating figure onstage, whether she was stomping around in shredded fishnets and cowboy boots in Die Hunns next to punk pariah husband Duane Peters (U.S. Bombs) or literally spewing fire…
Even when Primal Scream didn’t match the creative heights reached by Screamadelica’s rave-worthy bliss-outs or the electro-punk of XTRMNTR, they never lacked self-confidence. After all, they coaxed (and kept) My Bloody Valentine’s reclusive Kevin Shields out of hibernation, and had the courage to embrace sinewy darkwave long before it was…
Olesi: Fragments of an Earth, completely produced and sung by Georgia Anne Muldrow, may be the most idiosyncratic soul album released this year. Most of the songs last less than three minutes, living up to the title’s promise as “fragments” and random thoughts. Muldrow manipulates her voice, double-tracking it and…
This is a collaboration between blues noise guitarist/singer Jon Spencer and Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars, another band that knows a thing or two about laying down a primal blues squall. The legendary Jim Dickson produced, but the music has the sloppy, uncontained feel of a…
No doubt about it, The HorrorPops are headed for Hades. Not because the fearsome foursome of Holland-born hipster hellcats committed any mass murders (that we know of), but simply because we’re certain they’ve somehow sold their souls to Satan. How else would you explain the devilish fervor in which punky…
Is Mary J. Blige still the reigning queen of hip-hop soul? It was looking iffy a few years ago, when she released her lukewarm Love & Life, an awkward attempt to reconcile her usual gritty themes of abusive relationships and ghetto drama with an increasingly happy personal life — newly…
Although Missouri native Will Johnson splits his time among Undertow Orchestra, South San Gabriel, and solo projects, he’s best known as the leader of Denton, Texas’ Centro-Matic, a band that wraps Johnson’s sometimes fragile (and sometimes raucous) songs in a gauze of country feedback and big-sky rock ‘n’ roll. For…
Henry Rollins’ personal multimedia campaign, based on his ripped abs and smart ass, has made him the closest thing to a mainstream celebrity American punk rock has produced. But that extra-caffeinated personality obscures some genuine musical accomplishments. It was his fury that stoked Black Flag into the band that punk…
