Ani DiFranco Little Plastic Castle (Righteous Babe) Spice who? The real story behind girl power is Ani DiFranco, the singer-songwriter from Buffalo who has just released her tenth album. Though she’s sold more than a million discs, DiFranco has remained true to her independent roots, refusing to leave the label…

Taja Sevelle Toys of Vanity (550 Music) It’s been nearly a decade since The Guy They Used To Call Prince gave Taja Sevelle a record deal. Rather than attending college, the young Minneapolis native moved to Los Angeles, released a self-titled debut, and suffered the misfortune of having her single,…

It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it, but not everyone is convinced that electronica is worth paying money to hear live. When the British rave band Orbital headlined Lollapalooza in several cities last year, its concerts featured video screens, smoke machines, strobe lights, one giant disco…

Like David Sanborn or Michael Brecker, Clarence Clemons has played the saxophone for so long and for so many recording artists that his sound has become instantly recognizable. It’s a bit like a favorite pair of jeans: durable, comfortable, well-worn at the edges. Clemons has played with Aretha Franklin, Alvin…

Remember when indie rock was totally cool? The place to be was Austin, Texas — make that Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which was even cooler. All anyone cared about was the Archers of Loaf, whether Unrest was going to tour again, and what Kim Gordon was up to. Major labels…

Pearl Jam Yield (Epic) Eddie Vedder has always been a better star than an artist, and don’t let any critic who slept through Ten (1991) and raved about No Code (1996) tell you otherwise. He’s best at grand gestures, such as belting out “Alive” or vowing to bring Ticketmaster to…

Linda Smith Preference: Selected Songs, 19871991 (Harriet) Spare, honest, perceptive, and passionate in a peculiarly subdued way, singer-songwriter Linda Smith’s deceptively simple songs seem to have been beamed in from a parallel universe. No fake earnestness. No calculatedly naive idealism. No artifice whatsoever. These nineteen tracks, recorded at Smith’s Baltimore…

Noel Gallagher is sitting in the back of a van, speeding through Fairfax, Virginia, the second stop on the American leg of Oasis’ 1998 world tour. The songwriter for one of the most popular bands in the world is almost impossible to understand: His guttural accent, thick as a bowl…

The last time East Indian music was “hip,” four white English lads were directly responsible. The Beatles popularized the sounds of the sitar and the tabla drum in songs such as “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Within You Without You.” As a result an entire…

Various Artists Star Rise (Real World) In 1990 Michael Brook, a New-Age guitarist and producer, collaborated with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a Pakistani singer of Sufi devotional hymns, to create the album Mustt Mustt, an early example of ancient-meets-ambient hybridism. Khan was already a major celebrity in many Eastern countries…

Some of Rick Miller’s first sexual fantasies came to him while assembling mobile homes in his dad’s factory in Henderson, North Carolina. A group of cleaning women worked in the factory, and one particularly piqued Miller’s pubescent fancy. “She was about 45 years old,” Miller recalls fondly, “and she wore…

Toward the end of this week, more than a dozen singers-songwriters will begin making their way to Broward County to compete in the South Florida Folk Festival. Al Scortino will drive two hours from Sebastian, just north of Vero Beach, in his Mazda pickup truck. Bernice Lewis, from Williamstown, Massachusetts,…

Ben Folds Five Naked Baby Photos (Caroline) This is the proverbial “contractual obligation” album: When Ben Folds Five signed to Sony, the band still owed its first label, Caroline Records, one more full-length album. This kind of circumstance usually results in a hastily assembled collection of “rare” tracks (a euphemism…

Supersonic Wall to Wall Moustache (Sire) “Welcome to the fucked-up chemical beats of Supersonic,” announces this band’s press kit, which means there’s now more weight on the electronica bandwagon that was initially steered by the Chemical Brothers. Unlike that pioneering duo, however, Darren Pickles and Slapper Dave of Supersonic are…

Various Artists In Tha Beginning…There Was Rap (Priority Records) Say what you will about rap — it’s sexist, it promotes violence, it gave Vanilla Ice his fifteen minutes of fame — but it changed popular music as we know it. First heard in the late Seventies and early Eighties, rap…

America’s recent burst of creative energy — grunge — is definitely over, yet in 1997 the music industry continued to feed us a string of false Pearl Jams: Tonic, Matchbox 20, Better Than Ezra, Live, the Verve Pipe, et cetera. It’s no wonder the best music of 1997 came from…

At the start of the year, it looked as though 1997 would be, like 1996, the year of the Macarena. In January the hackles-raising dance track racked up its 70th week — 70th! — on the Billboard singles chart. Mercifully the the song faded away sometime in February, but don’t…

There comes a point in every rock fan’s listening career when he or she feels obligated to “try” jazz. It’s tricky musical territory for the novitiate, full of snobs and geniuses and difficult theories. There’s much talk about “tone” and “phrasing” and other things that don’t necessarily matter much in…

Kacy Crowley Anchorless (Atlantic) This talented singer-songwriter was born in Connecticut and grew up listening to the heartland rock and roll of John Cougar Mellencamp. She did a brief stint as a Grateful Dead groupie then devoted herself to playing music in the coffeehouses of Los Angeles. She played with…

In the radio business, it’s known as the New Adult Contemporary format, or NAC, though more descriptive terms might be “smooth jazz,” “New Age,” “easy listening,” or simply “background music.” Or as one L.A. Times writer described it, “instrumental wallpaper.” Its most famous practitioners are the pianists Jim Brickman (who…

The Sneaker Pimps are most easily identified with their slow-grooving single “6 Underground,” a moody little pastiche of trip-hop beats, chilly xylophone, and a sampled sound check (“a one-two, a one-two”). Over it all sings Kelli Dayton, a 22-year-old waif with the sort of heliumized voice that’s currently in fashion…

Roni Size and Reprazent Newforms (Mercury) Mainstream America got its first real taste of electronica from Prodigy, the British group that took a rather obscure form of electronic dance music and made it accessible by adding familiar rap/punk vocals (and a familiar rap/punk image). The result was this past summer’s…