Club d’Elf, Now I Understand (Accurate). The brainchild of Boston bassist Mike Rivard, Club d’Elf is a genre-shattering collective that merges jazz, hip-hop, electronic music, worldbeat and more with the help of collaborators ranging from DJ Logic to onetime David Bowie associate Reeves Gabrels. Now I Understand is both instrumentally…
There’s a decrepit old building on St. Peter Street, in the heart of the French Quarter, with little in the way of amenities; drinks aren’t even served there. Regardless, tourists line up hours before showtime because they know that Preservation Hall is one of the few pillars of old-school New…
How to make a KMFDM album: Pair sexy-girl vocals with a frog-throated male lead spitting angry, Euro-style slow-paced raps (à la Trent Reznor on “Down in It”), synthesize every beat to the max and then cover it all up with iconic Brute! artwork. Stick the group’s acronym in a chorus…
Although thinking-man’s metal band Queensrche has a respectable catalogue of albums under its belt — including classics such as Empire and Rage for Order — its legacy was cemented by 1988’s Operation: Mindcrime, one of the greatest and most successful rock operas ever made. Mindcrime wove a tale of a…
Eric Bachmann is one of the newest and most valuable additions to the Denver music scene. A longtime North Carolinian, he first came to indie-rock prominence in the Archers of Loaf, an act capable of cranking up a righteous racket, and subsequently formed Barry Black, an instrumental outfit that paired…
If Jenny Lewis has learned anything from her high-profile friends and semi-frequent collaborators Conor Oberst and Ben Gibbard, it’s this: The bigger you get, the more people hate on you, so let the authenticity of the music be the final word. Nowhere is this lesson more obvious than on Lewis’s…
One of the quickest ways to break into the biz or revitalize a stagnant career is to modernize someone else’s hit song a decade or so after its release with a clever cover version. It worked wonders for Marilyn Manson and Alien Ant Farm — even Johnny Cash cashed in…
Vinnie Paz, Stoupe and DJ Kwestion have to be some of the hardest-working cats in indie/underground hip-hop. Although their group, Jedi Mind Tricks, has released only four albums in its ten-year existence, the three are the brains behind lauded projects from Outerspace and Army of the Pharaohs and had a…
It was inevitable that crunk would spawn its own subgenres, and you can go ahead and pencil in Atlanta’s Dem Franchize Boyz atop the nascent “snap music” movement. Their main competition is D4L, which proved that less really can be less on the ridiculously minimal hit “Laffy Taffy,” which taints…
In August 1883, Krakatau, south of Java, violently erupted, producing a cataclysmic sound — the loudest ever recorded by humans. Earlier this year, Shannon Saling, bass player and vocalist for punk-rock provocateurs the Swindlers, formed Krakatau with Bailey Cecil of Core of the Earth and former members of Black Lamb…
New York City beat bastards James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy just love wiping their french-fry greasy DFA fingers all over other people’s records. Their latest remix collection — with geeked-out takes on Tiga, N.E.R.D., Nine Inch Nails and many more — is a surprisingly chilled-out, completely addictive treat that should…
Blue Ice is like the well-groomed black sheep of the Baker neighborhood. Located at 22 Broadway, the nightclub borders the hipsterland territory of hi-dive/Sputnik and is just a block up from the rocker haven of 3 Kings Tavern. It’s also just a hop, skip and handcuffed jump from the Crypt,…
The techtonic plates continue to shift along Denver’s increasingly competitive concert scene. Although no official statement has been released, Chuck Morris will be vacating his current post at Live Nation to join his proteges, Don Strasburg and Brent Fedrizzi, at the new Denver outpost of Anschutz Entertainment Group. Morris, one…
The video for Band of Horses’ “Funeral” features scratchy black-and-white footage of a lonely, broken old man slowly drinking himself to death in a smoky beer-and-a-shot bar, his only friends the bottom of his mug, a jukebox and memories of a dead dog. Framing morose lyrics such as “I’m coming…
It’s been a while since I’ve been to a house show — since back when there was a Democrat in the White House and emo was all about sporting a pair of thick, black-plastic specs and a cardigan and sharing your innermost thoughts with strangers on LiveJournal rather than MySpace…
Motet drummer and principal composer Dave Watts might be among the most studied timekeepers on the planet. Given to using terms like “African diaspora” when describing his rhythmic influences, Watts isn’t simply smacking the cans in standard time, as evidenced by his musical output. Drawing upon a lifelong passion for…
Chris Ward is multi-faceted, to say the very least. Getting his start at Cartoon Network, Ward was among the team of weirdos that resurrected an obscure Hanna-Barbera cartoon titled Sealab 2020 and turned it into the more risqué Sealab 2021. During his stint with that show, Ward worked as an…
Boston’s Godsmack has a well-earned reputation for darkness. But prior to a show in Dallas, the outfit’s drummer, Shannon Larkin, sounds as cheerful as a member of Up With People. “I’m extremely grateful to be in this business, on this label, in this band — and just glad to be…
The music industry has a lot in common with the average automobile plant. Lots can go wrong, but when everything’s operating at peak efficiency, it’s still capable of turning out impressive products. Like, for instance, B’Day, a sleek new model that displays all the benefits of custom manufacture. Granted, Beyoncé…
Gnawing your way through a new Mars Volta record is always something of a chore at first. The band — anchored by instrumentalist/composer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and lyricist/vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala — turns out huge mind-fucks as songs, mixing prog-metal, psychedelia and swaggering Latin flavors into massive, album-long narratives whose intent is…
As more and more labels dust off long-gone, commercially failed but artistically significant bands, it’s refreshing to see Sub Pop fight the sad irony of post-mortem acclaim by anthologizing a band that’s alive and kicking hard with years of neglected gems under its belt. Oregon’s Dead Moon is a garage…
Towers of London would be the most original rock band to ever come out of England — if this was 1975. Sadly for Towers, it’s not. The London mates, with their ultra-party-coiffed manes, come off as third-generation wannabes so devoid of pure inspiration that even their influences look asinine. The…
