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…
Even after “retiring” from music a few times since making the tenor sax his raison de vivre in 1946, Sonny Rollins has never ceased to be a jazz innovator and leader. For a man who cut his teeth performing under geniuses Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk and who chose to…
As two South Florida-centric shows, The Real World: Key West and 8th and Ocean, start this week on MTV, you have to wonder how much of a role the local techno-dominated music scene will play in them. The Real World will most likely stay away and stick with the parrothead…
Things happen pretty fast on the streets of the Dirty South. Whereas crunk ruled the block last year, by the end of 2005, it had been boiled down to an even more minimalist, bootycentric, low-end theory called snap music. At the center of crunk’s rapid-fire evolution, Atlanta has spewed out…
Since the alt.country revival that began in the ’80s and blossomed in the past ten years, bands aplenty have sprung up, weaned on Wilco, Sun Volt, and the like. Along with local song-killers Charlie Pickett, the Silos, and the Mavericks, Truckstop Coffee continues that long tradition of American roots music,…
Believe it or not, in the dancehall world, a guy can be both a self-declared “grindacologist” and a raging homophobe. Around the world, Beenie Man is equally famous for his big-bounce, hook-filled dancehall and his inflammatory comments — on and offstage — about gays. But though the Kingston-born Moses Davis…
Are they goth? Are they rock? Does it matter? The Sisters of Mercy have put together more than two decades of smash hits, public roustabouts, great lines, and other oddities. OK, so they don’t have any smash hits, but try telling that to the rabid fan base the Sisters have…
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…
Willie Nelson has made a career of bucking the conservative conventions of Nashville’s Music Row, the nominal capital of mainstream country music. Still, Nelson achieved hard-won stardom with and beyond the country music audience: rednecks, punks, squares, and hepcats comprise Nelson’s fan base. But this past Valentine’s Day, Nelson pulled…
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…
U.K. music scribes have always been addicted to hype — but their ballyhooing of Arctic Monkeys is over-the-top even by their standards. The group couldn’t live up to their praise if it featured Jesus on vocals and Mohammed on guitar. (We’d illustrate that, but we’re fond of the building.) So…
Back in the early days of Mogwai’s career, an album titled Mr. Beast would have matched the band’s Category 5 noise hurricanes perfectly. But as the Scotsmen refined their sound over the next decade, moments of levity and clarity — airy synths, strings, eerie silences — made the band’s emotional…
It might not be cool to say, but missing out on seeing Freddie Mercury perform live is one of the great musical tragedies of my life. I’m always struck by the regret I feel at this fact, and attempts on my part to compensate — namely, rewatching Queen’s Live at…
One more reason to hate/boycott/firebomb Starbucks: Without some serious redirection of popular perception, Shawn Snyder’s kind of intimate, cozy folk music will forever be associated with currant scones and half-decaf triple venti lattes. Maybe, though, that’s not such a bad thing — if the World Caffeine Syndicate chose to carry…
Styles come and fads go, yet thankfully, the funk always lurks, its spirit manifest in different forms and from unlikely tributaries. Believe it or not, New Orleans’ Johnny Sketch & the Dirty Notes hail from classical-music backgrounds. At Loyola U., goat- eed bandleader Johnny Sketch (a.k.a. Marc Paradis) majored in…
What started off as a “shits ‘n’ giggles in the basement” kind of band has grown into an unstoppable street punk/Oi! force to be reckoned with. The Dropkick Murphys even have a competitive hockey squad in the Boston area! So ten years, five full-lengths, and a bucketful of singles later,…
