Crawling from the aural and psychic wreckage of the Brian Jonestown Massacre a couple of years ago, guitarist Bobby Hecksher (who has worked with Beck) blinked his eyes a few times, massaged his bruised limbs, and promptly dove back into the fray — on his own terms this time. With…
When Pere Ubu roared out of Cleveland in the mid-’70s, it was clear that the band came with neither an agenda nor a peer group. Pere Ubu was antipunk, antirock, and antimusic, yet managed to attract a sizable following among fans of punk, rock, and music — an intriguing balancing…
It’s impossible to know what we’re going to be doing on any given night,” Bob Weir declares. Some things never change, at least where lengthy set lists and voluminous back catalogs are concerned. The quote isn’t from Weir’s days with the Grateful Dead, the band he cofounded in the mid-’60s…
You haven’t forgotten Modern English, have you? Dontcha remember that one time they stopped the whole world? Melted for us, they did. But that was long, long ago (just check the date range of this greatest-hits collection), and the British act never forged a legacy beyond one-hit-wonder status. Life in…
Injustice continues to haunt Death Becomes You, the shockingest, rockingest troupe Coral Springs has ever birthed. Bandwidth’s last DBY installment documented the lads’ shunting at the Orbit club in Boynton Beach back in February, when they were scheduled to open for Insane Clown Posse but were turned away at the…
For the French, loving music is not enough; one must embrace it with the codependent disgust of a couple verging on a murder-suicide. The French avant-rock group Ulan Bator clearly loves the pop tradition in this way. Listening to the trio’s first American release (and fourth overall) is like tracing…
Rick from the Ex-Cretins and I were thinking the same thing: “I packed way too many pairs of shorts for this trip,” he groused, as we stood outside the Buffalo Club on East Seventh Street and grimaced at the maliciously cold gust of Austin evening air attacking our tender South…
Upon its emergence in the early ’90s, the Dave Matthews Band was either critically ignored or dismissed by reviewers as yet another in a seemingly endless string of sincere, acoustic-oriented jam acts then headlining clubs in every college town in America. And even the decent numbers racked up by the…
The Van Zant musical family tree has been so thoroughly sanctified by tragedy and time that objectively considering any new release from its members without viewing it through the shattered prism of the family’s Southern gothic drama is difficult. That theory holds especially true for Van Zant, the second teaming…
Five years ago BR5-49 was hailed as proof that country music’s fat cats had finally come to their senses. After gaining a rabid following on Nashville’s fringe, BR5-49’s classic-but¯kicked-in-the-pants country earned the band a deal with Arista Records. Y’all-ternative types took it as a sign that the industry would soon…
When it comes to turning pop music into activism, Kathleen Hanna is in a league of her own. Since founding Bikini Kill in the early ’90s, the brashest and most fascinating of the riot grrrls has worked from the premise that art never exists in a vacuum. Equal parts meditation…
The needle on my record player is wearing thin./This record has been playing since the day you’ve been with him.” If you’re in the lucrative 12-to-24¯year-old pop-music target market, you’ve heard this refrain from New Found Glory’s “Hit or Miss.” Rock radio is playing it ad nauseam. It’s being put…
“All I know,” says Tom O’Keefe, “is that this is the first time in nine years I’ve been interviewed.” After starting Neurodisc Records with his business partner John Wai in 1992, O’Keefe has realized his dream of a full-time, behind-the-scenes, music-business job. But since the Sunrise-based company is nearly invisible…
On the surface the pairing of arch New York rock icon Elliott Murphy and English folk legend Iain Matthews seems slightly incongruous, but closer examination reveals the subtle connections. Murphy is an American expatriate living in Paris, while Matthews has relocated to Austin, Texas. Both were championed by critics and…
Blame Blood, Sweat and Tears and Spyro Gyra (not to mention nouvelle cuisine) for ruining the word fusion; since the heyday of those groups, uttering the word brings thoughts of endless wank-offery, followed by the image of some dude soloing with a stupid just-lost-a-pinkie-to-his-hedge-clippers look on his face. However, if…
In The Dirty South: Raw & Uncut, producer and director Wills Felin follows four strippers and a host of hip-hoppers on a musical-sexual romp around three infamous cities: Daytona Beach, Atlanta, and Miami. Against a backdrop of blue sky and blue water, blazing sun and blazing weed, bikini-clad booties jiggle…
Three peninsular bands are making the trek to Austin next week, not to engage in psychological warfare against the newly installed dauphin of the Bush dynasty (you know, like Poppy did to Noriega) but to strut their respective stuffs at South by Southwest, the massive music-and-media conference that sends the…
Interesting, small records from bummed-out English guys with guitars are popping up like dandelions again — we might be coming up on exciting times. Back in the mid-’80s you couldn’t walk past a high school without seeing at least one guy in a Smiths T-shirt, sitting by himself underneath a…
Putting it mildly, Icky Flix, the new DVD from the prepunk San Fran collective the Residents, is just the sort of wack Dadaist madness that could freak out even a post¯Rose MacGowan Marilyn Manson on his best day (assuming the lovely Ms. MacGowan had a positive influence on the boy)…
That Jennifer Lopez. I mean, whew. Look at her. She has hair like a wheat field in the wind, brown eyes richer than all the Rockefellers put together, and full, luscious lips just made to shout “Yes! Yes! Yes!” And in the photo on the back of the package, and…
Woe unto the lowly melodica. Why must it be consigned to the Fisher-Price page in the annals of great instruments? I can handle the nicknames: The pocket piano, toot-flute, blow accordion, wind piano, melodeon, melodyhorn, pianaca, and hooter all offend me not. But it still is shocking — shocking! –…
There’s a smart-ass in every crowd. This time it was one of our own, the one cheeky enough to utter the remark designed to get a rise out of former Marilyn Manson guitarist Scott Putesky during the debut of his new band, Stuck on Evil, at the Poor House February…
