If you want to learn, you go to an expert. Rick Miller, lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for North Carolina-based Southern Culture on the Skids, knows about a lot of things, not the least of which is life on the road. Later this month, Miller, bassist Mary Huff, drummer Dave…
Well, it’s official — more than a decade after their acrimonious split, seminal alt-rockers the Pixies are back. Sure, this comes as terrific news to some, but for a fan like myself, the idea makes me shudder. After all, it goes against one of the most immutable laws of the…
“The songs are all done, and as they go down on tape/The critics click their pens/Comparisons made and names dropped in all boldface/To sound like his best friends.” So begins “Sing a Song,” the first track on the debut solo effort by Denver Dalley — otherwise known as Statistics. Dalley…
Does country music make you feel like crying into your Bud and wishing for the return of June Carter Cash? Or maybe big, bad Johnny? Well, screw that wistful crap. Lucinda Williams is on her way. On her latest release, World Without Tears, she sings like an evangelical preacher bringing…
Hey, there. Why so glum? What’s that? You say music’s not fun anymore; it lacks the chutzpah and rebellion that made rock ‘n’ roll so trashy? And you wish someone would, just once, take you forcibly by the shirt collar and shake you, screaming “YEEOORRGGGGHH” into one ear while punching…
Watching middle-aged men and women dance is an experience akin to watching your friend get his ass kicked by a midget at a county fair — it’s a bit sad but also totally hilarious. Watching them bump and grind after they’ve imbibed six gin and tonics is an experience far…
Let’s say you die, go to heaven (or final resting place of your choosing), and God (or deity of your choosing) meets you at the gates. He takes you to his palatial mansion where he has a feast waiting for you in the breakfast nook; pancakes, biscuits and gravy, grapefruit…
It might seem that downtempo’s nascent era is far removed, as many of its famed alumni, including Massive Attack, Portishead, and Morcheeba, have either disappeared or regressed. Unfortunately for Lamb, the latter has become apparent. Through the late ’90s glory days, the duo of Andy Barlow and Louise Robinson stood…
Hypnotic Underworld is the first album in five years from Ghost, Japan’s greatest psychedelic export. Sure, Acid Mothers Temple is pretty amazing but not consistently great, sometimes spiraling off into the infinite blackness for 40 minutes too many. Ghost, however, gives so much and attempts to do so much within…
It’s not the band. They are little more than a bar band with a Texas accent. An extremely skilled one, mind you, but yeah, there it is. It’s not the melodies. There are only so many things you can do within rock ‘n’ roll’s guitar-drums-bass setup, and they’ve all been…
Like many young people, Robert Walter took classical piano lessons as a child, practicing the requisite number of hours to satisfy parental whims. But unlike those who became distracted and dropped their musical education, Walter continued, attending San Diego’s School of Creative and Performing Arts. “That was actually pretty intense,”…
Lucero frontman Ben Nichols went through the punk phase, then survived the metal years. But, ultimately he settled on country. It wasn’t the Memphis surroundings that influenced his taste for the form but rather an urge to grow as a songwriter. “I don’t think I was looking for something more…
The Walkmen deserve praise for painting their influences with something that is both a few shades weirder and more charged and electrifying. On the hell-raising “The Rat” from its second full-length, Bows + Arrows, the group sounds like it’s updating a lost U2 track circa ’83 (when Bono, the Edge,…
It’s Friday night. Need something to do, but you’re sick of everything? Has your quest to find a band with passion, hooks, and memorable lyrics been less than a success? Would it be too much trouble if an act could provide those goods and services in the studio but go…
Like his Christian name, Xela Zaid has taken the pretty melodies and emotional, solitary songs of the singer-songwriter and turned them inside out. The songs on his second independently released EP, Beloved, ride upon dark, acoustic guitar hooks, backed by the white noise of a transistor radio “played” by noise…
In these uncertain times, of one thing I’m certain: This is the very last Bandwidth. Ever. There. I said it, and I’m glad. In the final analysis, mixed feelings abound, but the opportunity to write news and feature stories is too exciting to pass up. I will leave you in…
True to its name, Very Ape communicates in wholly animalistic — as in natural and urgent — terms. Hailing from the same snow-capped Scandinavian environs that have already given us the Hives and Hellacopters, these ape-men are not only the ugliest band currently practicing; they’re also drug-free, as they make…
Jim Henson, Sesame Street’s visionary founder and lead puppeteer, was famous for never looking back. Bursting with creativity, Henson moved so swiftly from one project to the next that little attention was given to curating the countless music albums that sprang from his popular children’s TV show. Parents, toddlers, and…
Extravagantly gruff-voiced Mississippi rapper David Banner loves the motherfucking shit out of cursing. On Mississippi: The Album, the first of three CDs he released in 2003, his swearing took the form of a mad-as-hell Southerner unable to decide between succumbing to the virulent misogyny and violence swirling around him and…
Starsailor’s 2001 debut, Love Is Here — a million-selling Brit-rock triumph described by critics and fans alike as a tender, majestic union of Van Morrison, Jeff Buckley, and the Verve — was pretty much a hunk of crap. Leader James Walsh’s drab songwriting and overwrought vocals were about as stirring…
At half past midnight in early December at club I/O in Overtown, the Rev. Carleton “King” Coleman, the baldheaded provider of lightning and thunder, was emceeing his first show since he retired on-stage at New York’s famous Apollo Theater in 1967. Even though he was a month shy of his…
On the 2000 album The Moon and Antarctica, Modest Mouse begins with “Third Planet,” one of the great songs in recent American rock. Opening with a few solitary chords plucked by guest musician and lap steel guitarist Ben Blankenship, “Third Planet” thrusts the listener into a melancholy world of self-doubt…
