Music

DJ Garth is one of the most distinctive and exciting dance-music artists in the U.S. As a pioneer in the San Francisco house scene, Garth has been a driving force behind the famous Wicked parties and the stellar Grayhound label. His work ranges from shimmering, spaced-out excursions into druggy tribal…

Richie Havens first rose to prominence in the same Greenwich Village folk scene that produced Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and he’s had a lengthy and distinguished career. The first performer at Woodstock, Havens is immortalized in the documentary of the same name, in which he closes his set with…

The phrase “It’s all good” has never been less true when it comes to hip-hop. The genre’s mainstream branch is mighty uninteresting these days, with superstars regularly coming up short and intriguing new artists getting bypassed in favor of lowest-common-denominator one-shots — or am I premature in assuming that Meech…

Were Andy Warhol still aboveground, he could tweak his prescient bon mot about fame for the British music scene — something like “Every rock group in England will be called a brilliant, once-in-a-generation standard-setter at least once by New Musical Express.” Unfortunately for the Kooks, a Luke Pritchard-fronted combo that…

When the mothership lands on Earth and the aliens sift through the rubble of the hip-hop canon, their tentacle sensors are likely to pick up on the way in which many of the melanin-deficient MCs stand out for having blurred the line between beat-driven syncopation and the art of spoken…

Years before he was a filmmaker, Vincent Gallo was into music. He joined his first band at age nine, and by sixteen, he’d moved from Buffalo to New York City, where he played in Gray, an art-noise act, with Jean-Michel Basquiat. More than two decades later, he scored his film…

Elizabeth Rose, Blue Light December 10, 2007 Larimer Lounge Better than: Fleetwood Mac (according to photographer Brian Carney) Kudos to the Larimer Lounge (and booker John Baxter) for making the commitment to bring live music to the venue seven nights a week. It is exactly that kind of dedication and…

You may not be able to get up to Butte, Montana today for the memorial service of the late, and certainly great, Evel Knievel, but Denver punk band the S.O.B.s is here to help you celebrate the passing of this American legend with their new tune “Evel Knievel Is Dead.”…

Here’s a selection of the best of last week’s music blogging from around the Village Voice chain: The magic of a Melt Banana set is put into these words: “reminded me of the sound FX on that old Atari game Asteroids, hopped up on speed” and “knows how to assault…

Iron & Wine December 8, 2007 Paramount Theatre “Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news,” I say to Maggie as she comes out of the balcony bathroom at the Paramount. “The good news is that, according to this [computer-printed sign taped to the wall], Nick and Tom from DeVotchKa…

I came late to the UGK party. I was out of the country for much of their rise from 1992-1995, and then I lived in Nashville, where their legend had not yet spread, until the end of 1997. Even after moving back to Houston, it took me a few years…

Next summer, you can expect the above scene to be replicated across the country if kids outside our area code take to the tomfoolery of Nathaniel Motte and Sean Foreman like the ones here have. The pair, known in these parts as 3Oh!3 (and due tomorrow night at the Gothic…

The past couple of weeks have certainly been eventful for the members of the Photo Atlas. Late last month, the band parted ways with drummer Devon Shirley in the middle of an East Coast tour. And this past Monday, word came down that Rob Stevenson, the head of Stolen Transmission,…

Ali & Aj Insomniatic Hollywood Records 02:00-02:45 of “Potential Breakup Song” I think I might have stumbled into some strange tween land because I’m a little embarrassed to have this in my hands. Perhaps even more embarrassed that I’m nodding my head and tapping my toe. I mean, they’re right,…

For those of you discontent with the hip-hop scene, Ghostface Killah released an excellent album this week along with this accompanying video. Veteran rapper Pimp C dies in L.A. Rapper Pimp C, of the veteran and legendary Houston rap group UGK (Underground Kingz), was found dead in a Los Angeles…

Looks like this may turn out to be a jolly season after all. Late last week, I got word that one of my all-time favorite hometown bands is getting back together. Sure, it’s just for a few nights, but I’ll take whatever I can get. When Drag the River was…

If you’ve even skimmed a music blog over the past year, chances are you’re already familiar with Vampire Weekend. Together for less than two years, the band has generated a substantial blogosphere buzz that has spread to more traditional outlets — NPR, Spin and even the New York Times —…

These days, tons of bands try to be simultaneously sensitive and muscular — not to mention radio-friendly — with stirring guitar crunch, sweetly rendered vocal harmonies and heart-on-sleeve lyrics tackling the personal and the political. But few do it as well, or as genuinely, as Jimmy Eat World, which helped…

If there’s one artist who’s the least likely to release a Christmas album, it’s gotta be Aimee Mann, who’s built an entire career out of penning songs about heroin addiction and miscellaneous other forms of emotional agony. But that’s just what she did last year, and with the Aimee Mann…