On their eponymous debut, the Futureheads played like there was no tomorrow. The four-piece threw everything it had into its recordings. The result reflected the dangers of indie mod excess: artsy punk with a clever sense of humor and elaborate four-part harmonies run amok. News and Tributes, the band’s sophomore…
Like Green Day, Rancid was once reviled as a band of poseurs by much of the punk-rock intelligentsia, but is now seen as a standard-bearer for the genre — and sheer persistence is a big reason why. Early discs such as 1993’s Rancid and 1995’s And Out Come the Wolves…
Not since the Great Split of 1972 — when the Jefferson Airplane splintered into Hot Tuna and the Jefferson Starship (and, later, just Starship) — has debate raged so passionately about the co-existing offspring of a revered band. When At the Drive-In folded its tent in 2001, it spawned two…
Outside of having a really good acid trip while listening to a bootleg, Dark Star Orchestra is about the closest thing to a Grateful Dead resurrection that most Deadheads will experience in their lifetime. In 1997, the Dark Stars began faithfully re-creating Dead shows and have been lauded for their…
Just when you’re really getting into an act, it often seems to go the way of the dodo. A little more than a month after it was profiled in these pages, Kronow, a band that had gathered serious momentum in recent years and looked on the verge of breaking through,…
Ben Watt’s music career spans more than twenty years. As one half of London’s famed Everything but the Girl, Watt has sold millions of records worldwide with partner Tracey Thorn. In the mid-’90s, the act began dabbling in electronica, collaborating with producers such as house don Todd Terry and drum-and-bass…
Last night, the Fray appeared on the Tonight Show for the second time in six months — and just a week after the band was featured on the Late Show with David Letterman. The Fray played “How to Save a Life” — the title track from its debut — with…
Last month I profiled Dan Rutherford and Morning After Records, which had just partnered with Island Records (Beatdown, June 15). Although Rutherford’s young company is one of the area’s most high-profile, it’s far from the only locally based label. Here are a half-dozen more homegrown imprints putting out quality releases:…
Bob Morris has got his hands full tonight. His band, the Hush Sound, is slated to open for Fall Out Boy and the All-American Rejects at Chicago’s UIC Pavilion. Just prior to the hometown gig, as the guitarist/vocalist is being interviewed, his mother — who’s standing in line outside the…
According to drummer Wisam Alshaibi, three of the five troublemakers in the Blackout Pact are brothers in mediocrity. Years ago, Alshaibi was dumped by One Dying Wish “for not being good enough at playing drums,” he says, while guitarist Joe Ramirez and bassist B.J. Bailey were sacked by the musicians…
Andrew McMahon’s story is a Behind the Music executive producer’s wet dream. Soon after graduating from high school, the singer-songwriter-pianist scored a Drive-Thru Records deal with his Orange County, California, quintet, Something Corporate. Upon releasing their 2001 EP, Audioboxer, the emo-leaning piano-pop wavemakers were upstreamed into MCA Records (now part…
Jason Molina started out as an Iron Maiden-obsessed, bass-playing metal kid. At the same time, he was into Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. In the early ’90s, when his much older bandmates went off to college and got full-time jobs, Molina found himself searching for a way to…
Although the second album from All That Remains is a step up the evolutionary ladder, The Fall of Ideals suggests that one of indie metal’s most promising bands has reached a stalemate in terms of, well, ideas. Musically, the act has progressed nicely from the singular brashness found on its…
Chicago’s Psalm One is the kind of MC you instinctively want to applaud. Intelligently observant, a gifted collector of details, she ranks up there with Jean Grae as a strong woman on the mike who refuses to pen a summer club thumper about her pussy. Unfortunately, though, The Death of…
Most one-off solo projects fail to cast much light on the musicians who make them — but the debut by Greg Graffin, longtime lead singer for Bad Religion, is a noteworthy exception. Cold as the Clay is a dark folk album that works on its own terms even as it…
Cut Chemist’s The Audience’s Listening could be from a time capsule buried in 1998, when epic instrumental albums like Return of the DJ and Q-Bert’ s Wave Twisters were all the rage. And that’s a good thing. Unfairly maligned in recent years as the province of bedroom geeks disconnected from…
Don’t limit BaSheBa Earth by calling her a rapper. The woman born Portia Davis is also a fashion designer and a performance artist, not to mention a lyricist with a lot more on her mind than the average rhymer. Mothership runs on consciousness, and thanks to Davis’s passion and commitment,…
The members of Fissure Mystic are as DIY independent as they come, judging from their homemade CD case, which is fashioned from stapled canvas and cotton balls, with cover art glued to both sides. Based on the unique packaging, you’d almost expect the band to be some half-baked indie-pop outfit,…
Counting Crows, New Amsterdam: Live at Heineken Music Hall (Geffen). Why are these guys still around? Haven’t they already inflicted enough damage on music lovers? Isn’t a 74-minute concert souvenir whose few tolerable moments are (as usual) stolen from other, better artists a classic adding-insult-to-injury situation? Wouldn’t a nice, quiet…
They’re back. It’d be easy to call the members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young dinosaurs, but that’s not really fair. Dinosaurs are extinct; these guys are still alive and kicking. And with a catalogue of songs as great as theirs, sticking around is justified. Anthems like “Wooden Ships,” “Our…
Any ’80s-era ska-revival fan worth his or her checkered glad rags remembers the English Beat’s cheerful way with a politically charged song — whether it called for peace, love, unity or Margaret Thatcher’s head on a plate. Birmingham’s premier roughriders even managed to make Andy Williams seem cool, covering his…
Black Moon burst onto the hip-hop scene in the early ’90s, just as the hip-pop of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice was vanishing and Snoop and Dr. Dre were bringing the West Coast rap scene back to prominence. The act carried East Coast hip-hop on its back and introduced a…
