Schematic Records. On seeing that name, any rational consumer would infer a record label with a distinct plan, a blueprint. And why not, seeing how much regimentation most electronic music has exhibited over the past 30 years? Most, that is, except Miami-based Schematic Records — celebrating its tenth anniversary during…
A candidate for best and longest new band name of the millennium, Austin’s I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness has finally released its much-anticipated full-length debut. During the nearly three years since issuing its 2003 Britt Daniels-produced EP, the quintet has focused on sharpening its sound and building a…
This singer/songwriter from London got her start singing on tracks by mid-’90s electronic-music mavens like William Orbit and the Chemical Brothers. They provided her with fleshed-out musical settings before her songwriting had evolved to the point where she could provide her own; in return, she gave her collaborators’ work an…
Stephin Merritt has come out of the closet: Of course! He’s a theatrical composer! It must have been so hard passing as a pop singer all those years. The leader of Magnetic Fields and sundry other indie broods slides into musical theater so easily, you have to wonder how he…
Listeners unacquainted with such late-’60s cult classics as Something Else and The Village Green Preservation Society might hear in Ray Davies’ music imitations of the many British pop acts who’ve imitated him. At several points throughout Other People’s Lives, the first solo studio album in the former Kinks frontman’s four-decade…
Actor Jared Leto (Requiem for a Dream, Fight Club) has been fasting for four days. Except for water, fresh lemon, and cayenne pepper, he expects to eat nothing anytime soon. This isn’t one of those trendy Los Angeles diets, though; he’s burning off the staggering 62 pounds he packed on…
Bigger, better, longer, louder: From the opening fiddle flourish of Theresa Andersson on Friday afternoon to the Black Crowes’ final guitar wail Sunday night, this year’s Langerado Music Festival offered more of everything music fans could ask for. With more than 40 bands filling five stages, savvy Langeradans could concoct…
Hipsters looking for disagreeable, hard-to-digest music will presumably turn toward the new Liars record, Drum’s Not Dead, for a hearty dose of parent-scaring noise. It’s a reasonable assumption, as their last album, in spite of its weirdness and witch-loving themes, won out the noise-rock crowd by pulling off near-poppy magic…
While most “Golden Era” hip-hoppers have retired to community social clubs or made halfhearted, half-cracked attempts at reliving bygone days, Public Enemy has kept chipping away at the cornerstone. While on a seeming hiatus since Apocalypse 91, Chuck D, Flava Flav, and newest addition Paris have designed a sound through…
On the 26th edition of Fabric — host to arguably some of the most forward-thinking DJ mixes on the market (save for Studio Distribution’s long-running DJ-Kicks series) — electronic dance duo Global Communication explores future soul. British producers Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard capably mix a multitude of dance floor…
Released last year, Efon’s The Free Album showed the West Palm Beach hip-hop impresario’s serious determination and drive to put together a full-length mixtape of local talent. Add to the difficulty of shepherding rookie rappers the financial cost of production and pressing and it’s clear that in Efon, you’ve got…
At long last rescued from the out-of-print wilderness, Sonic Youth’s self-titled, under-heard debut reveals itself as quite the opposite of the festering, tonal Hades implied by subsequent records like Confusion Is Sex or Bad Moon Rising. Here we find a diminutive, blond Art Forum contributor picking up a bass, a…
The Flaming Lips play at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, March 17, at the Langerado Music Festival. See the following page for details.
Like any self-respecting alt-country artist, Neko Case would probably love to leave behind alt-country — and the negative connotations the term’s overuse has spawned — for good. The well-deep voice that earns deserved comparisons with Patsy Cline has made it difficult for Case to escape the tag, but she was…
Guess you had to be there, at Town Hall in New York City last July, though from the sounds of it, not so much. Thomas Bartlett, writing last summer on Salon, sent his own postcard lamenting how his beloved band went “all chamber/acoustic refined/wimpy,” resulting in music that came off…
For all the indie kids who prefer the white-boys-with-guitars dynamic of so many bands causing a stir on the independent scene, it’s actually a decent time to get into electronica. Acts like Mylo and Isolée have recently dropped surprisingly accessible records, and to that pile we can add Vitalic. Not…
More a collective than a literal band, the Minus 5 is Young Fresh Fellow Scott McCaughey’s vehicle for writing the perfect pop song, 1960s-style (i.e., inspired by era archetypes the Beatles, the Kinks, etc.). This time around, the 5 includes John Wesley Harding, luminaries from Wilco, and, of course, recurring…
SoCal-style punk has been suffering blows lately, with three members of über-influential Rich Kids on LSD passing away in the past year, plus billions of bands bastardizing the genre into incoherent screamo fests with the good parts stolen from Pennywise or Lagwagon. Thankfully, there are a few youngsters out there…
There are two options for the writer who takes on the daunting task of profiling Skeletons and the Girl-Faced Boys: Spend 800 words, make several trips to the thesaurus, and heap on arcane musical references struggling to describe the band’s sound. Or hang up the hyphens and simply call this…
Honesty and rock ‘n’ roll have always enjoyed an uneasy truce. For every group that bleeds sincerity, there’s another that revels in absurdity. Elefant, fronted by the purposely flamboyant Diego Garcia, further blurs the line, incorporating theatrical flair into notoriously self-serious indie rock. Garcia is the driving force behind the…
There’s a sticker on the front of my copy of these reissued 1959 sessions that informs us that Mojo called this effort from the still-living Big Easy guitarist “one of the top ten greatest guitar albums of all time.” And for the first few tracks, that seems to be very…
The Veronicas are 20-year-old Australian twins who had the awesome idea of forming a band around the sound of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.” (In further awesomeness, neither twin is named Veronica; they’re Jess and Lisa Origliasso.) The Secret Life of the Veronicas, the girls’ high-octane debut, arrives wrapped…
