Music

They were able to sell more than five million copies of their bottom-shaking, new-wave-flavored debut, Hot Fuss. But the Killers clearly learned a thing or two about playing the long odds in their Vegas stamping grounds, returning last October with a second effort, Sam’s Town, that, surprisingly, owes less to…

The Eric McFadden Trio could just be the Band of Gypsys for the new millennium, a fact not lost on McFadden, who not only borrowed a few tricks from Hendrix, but even called his previous band the Eric McFadden Experience. In all fairness, though, McFadden’s scope runs wider. On 2005’s…

Does anyone truly know what indie rock sounds like? While the term is as ubiquitious as alt-rock was over a decade ago, it can also be extremely nebulous. Even so, there’s one musician whose music embodies the designation: Sam Jayne, one of the primary architects of the aesthetic. In the…

The “collective” part of Animal Collective’s name is meant literally. Although the group is built around a core quartet — Avey Tare, Geologist, Deaken and, inevitably, Panda Bear — the musicians play and record in assorted configurations; some tracks feature just one of them, while others include all four. This…

Mickey Madden of Maroon 5 reportedly financed VietNam’s self-titled debut full-length — but don’t hold that against singer/songwriter Michael Gerner, whose band shares this bill with the Black Angels and Mothership. Granted, Gerner’s a classicist of sorts, but he couldn’t be less interested in making glossy pop soul for a…

Most people’s idea of doing karaoke involves standing alone on a stage in front of a mike, singing the words to a song that they vaguely know, helped along by reading the words on a screen. The setting, of course, varies depending upon where you go. Ultimately, though, the idea…

With the focused intensity of Friedrich Nietzsche, Tripp Nasty leads his avant chamber orchestra through a variety of classical musical styles. Instead of adhering to the compositions of yesteryear, though, Tripp composes and arranges his own music, which is reminiscent of Thin Blue Line-era Philip Glass and Glenn Branca. While…

It’s early in the current Red Rocks season, but the marvelous venue’s most unusual 2007 show may have already taken place. The May 15 date featuring Icelandic sprite Björk and harpist Joanna Newsom offered the sort of challenging music that wouldn’t be expected to draw a throng. Yet the rows…

Insane. That was the scene this past Friday night at the Fillmore. The Clown was in town, and the Juggalos were in full effect. “What’s up, my Juggalo pissin’ homeboys?” asked one guy as he flung open the door to the Fillmore’s secret bathroom. “If you’re not down with the…

Jackson Ellis is freaking out. In late April, the 26-year-old publisher of the independent music and fiction magazine Verbicide got word that starting on July 15, his shipping rates would increase by somewhere between 30 and 40 percent. “It’s not going be the thing that kills me,” he says via…

I feel like I can’t speak to the press anymore in a manner that I’d normally have a conversation,” declares hip-hop producer turned fledgling rocker Ramble John Krohn, who performs as RJD2. Why not? Because he believes a couple of his offhand comments are being used to beat him up…

Matt Mahaffey is probably best known as the guy behind the Expedia.com jingle, which is a shame. His indie-pop outfit, Self, is just as catchy. It’s been seven years since Self put out a legitimate release (DreamWorks refused to release Self’s 2004 LP, Ornament and Crime), but Mahaffey promises via…

In the span of about two weeks, Patterson Hood got divorced, had his car stolen and watched the band he started with Mike Cooley, Adam’s House Cat, break up. This was back in 1991. Shortly thereafter, he and Cooley were eating dinner and listening to an elderly couple who looked…

In an era when you can practically take every album into the critic’s version of the CSI laboratory (complete with Zero 7 playing in the background) in order to determine its exact points of reference and the width of its bandwagon tread, it’s refreshing to hear something like Welcome’s Sirs,…

Creatively speaking, Sweden’s Gustav Ejstes, the man behind Dungen, refuses to remain earthbound. On Tio Bitar, he takes listeners on a trip to the Fab Nebula, where almost everything within earshot sounds literally out of this world. Ejstes’s ingredients will be familiar to fans of psychedelia, prog and musical weirdness…

There is nothing un-sexy about Mannequin Makeout. Its five-song self-titled EP is a coed fete of lusty hormones and throbbing erratic heartbeats. Even in the disc’s opening lines, “You know but you won’t show anymore/I know I love you but I don’t show it anymore,” there is a Portishead-like sensuality…

Although New Dialectic is named for a form of polemics, Get in the Way eschews heated exchanges for a more intellectually stimulating brand of discourse. The EP, which receives the release-party treatment on Saturday, May 12, at a Walnut Room show also featuring Tifah and the Heyday, proves that smarts…

Paris Bennett, Princess P (TVT Records). Bennett was an amiable American Idol contestant. But a cover of “My Boyfriend’s Back” capable of triggering the gag reflex and “Let Me Rap,” which pairs her with Kevin “Chicken Little” Corvais on a track that name-drops Kevin Federline, extinguishes the last flicker of…

At the start of Infinity on High, Fall Out Boy’s latest, label head Jay-Z declares, “What you critics say will never happen!” — a statement meant to make Pete Wentz and company seem like the sort of act reviewers habitually bash. Actually, mainstream music writers have been fairly kind to…

If sleaze rock is the tongue-kissing cousin of heavy metal, then Nashville Pussy is Gene Simmons’s hillbilly stunt double. Led by the twin-guitar attack of husband and wife duo Blaine Cartwright and Ruyter Suys, the Atlanta-based act got its start glorifying Southern rock’s excesses in the late ’90s with songs…