Music

It’s been seven years since Ice Cube released a solo album and even longer since he’s been on tour by himself. But with his Westside Connection lying in the hip-hop graveyard, his hunger to get back on the mike was fueled, and Cube took off an entire year from Hollywood…

Summer’s upon us, finals are over, school is out. It’s bike weather and bare ankles as far as the eye can see. Swim trunks and park picnics, making trouble like teenagers in haste — it all makes for a motion-picture soundtrack, and Fifth Hour Hero is the feel-good hit of…

Charlie Musselwhite’s rural innocence and Anglo complexion made him an anomaly when he left Memphis at eighteen to educate himself at the foot of Chicago blues legends Junior Wells, James Cotton, Big Walter “Shakey” Horton and Little Walter. But within four years, the harp-blowing prodigy had not only befriended and…

Few of the original punk-rockers remain as cantankerous and contrary as they were during their initial infamy. But Mark E. Smith, who’s been wailing for the Fall since the group’s birth in 1977-era Manchester, England, isn’t about to go soft. Take Fall Heads Roll, issued by Narnack Records last October…

God Forbid musters some of the most anthemic riffs and choruses in metalcore, injecting its music with megadoses of classic thrash without ever succumbing to necrophiliac retro impulses. The act’s most recent album, IV: Constitution of Treason, is nearly operatic at times. One of the best metal discs of 2005,…

While Blur was busy parading around the globe to great acclaim in the ’90s, showing off the Brit-pop crown and racking up tabloid headlines, the Charlatans UK were quietly amassing a stable of number-one hits and headlining gigs. Fast-forward to 2006, and it’s more of the same. Although the elder…

At youngliars.blogspot.com, the most recent post reads, “Earth to People: Love is the ultimate truth at the heart of existence. Treat each other with care. To be cynical is no longer useful and wildly irresponsible. Please, be here now.” This is the professed Internet axiom of blogger DAS, who, presumably,…

Leon Russell is a living link to several different musical eras. As a teenager, he gigged with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis in his fireballing prime before moving to Los Angeles and becoming a studio regular on Phil Spector productions such as Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain…

So I say to my editor, “How about this Pretty Thigh band?” He turns, looks down at me (because I’m shorter) and, blunt like a cigar, the dude replies, “I’m hip,” and “I like them.” And it’s true. He is hip. But even more, Pretty Thigh is a band to…

New-school drum-and-bass dons Nicolas Ruoff and Florian Harres, known collectively as Phace, are taking over the scene. Close friends since their school days in southwest Germany, the two cut their teeth on the massive sounds of U.K. D&B, and it wasn’t long before their passion for the style led them…

Basically,” says bassist Curtis Durham, “we’re just four guys who were sick of all the crap from our other bands and got together.” Durham’s joking, but from the sound of it, the members of this local pop-rock outfit complement each other, and together they communicate better than any other group…

Tool sucks live — if you’re a casual concert-goer expecting all the trappings of a classic rock show that is — because a Tool performance has no pyro, no special effects, no stunning light show or outrageous antics. Last Wednesday night, I was one of more than 2,000 lucky bastards…

The formula is simple: Add Sabbath to Zeppelin and multiply by Hendrix. The result — as every snooty writer from Vice to NME to Rolling Stone has concluded — is Wolfmother, an Australian band three decades too late. But really, the math doesn’t add up. Wolfmother is much too cheery…

Melody Thorton’s brain moves a mile a minute — but this particular Pussycat Doll doesn’t always seem to know where it’s going. Consider this verbal ejaculation: “But I think…BLUBLUBLUBLUBLU BLUH! Excuse me! I’m sorry. Hahaha! I’m losing my train of thought because I’m, like, looking at the mirror at something…

Snow Patrol’s third album, Final Straw, helped the U.K. band explode abroad in 2004, and the members are hoping that their latest, Eyes Open, will firmly establish them here in the States. Whether they acknowledge the comparisons or not, however, they’ve been dogged by the success of Coldplay ever since…

Mike Patton should have worn out his welcome by now. After all, the guy’s got more side projects than he’s got sides. Yet the Good General’s music is usually interesting enough to justify its existence, and Peeping Tom’s debut is no exception. Despite the disc’s artsy concept (Patton and his…

To spectators of the Rust Belt garage-rock revival, the Raconteurs must seem like a dream come true. For Detroit darling Jack White, the band is the perfect chance for him to ditch his lubberly sidekick, Meg; for his Motor City counterpart, Brendan Benson, it’s a way to grab some sack;…

It’s a shame that Pearl Jam is a great album. Not because there’s anything wrong with Pearl Jam putting together a pop-rock album with fire and vigor; the first three songs, particularly the radio-perfect “World Wide Suicide,” showcase a screaming, off-the-walls Pearl Jam that sounds straight out of the mid-’90s…

Kill Rock Stars is owned by a man named Slim Moon who has better taste in music than you do. His ears are irrefutably sharp: The KRS roster is a dense handbook on indie-underground innovators and breakthrough wonders ranging from Sleater-Kinney and Elliott Smith to the Gossip and Xiu Xiu…

Maybe for his next trick, illusionist David Blaine will arrange to have himself sewn up in the rotting carcass of an elephant. He could eat Funyuns, watch TV and beat off in there — then emerge triumphantly at the next Republican National Convention, weeping messiah-like as red, white and blue…

Guitarist Mark Turner’s Homebrew is less a band than a platform upon which a swarm of Denver’s best-known (and best) blues and R&B players can cut loose. And despite the disc’s title, smoke and mirrors aren’t required. The sounds on display here aren’t of the gutbucket variety. Instead, the disc…