Dear Sir, released in 1995, marked singer-songwriter Chan Marshall as one Power-ful Cat — but as the years wore on, she proved to be a relatively sedentary one, as well. On disc after disc after disc, her spare arrangements and tenderly purred vocals came to both define and entrap her…
Check out the collabos on Jamie Foxx’s new album, Unpredictable: Ludacris, Twista, the Game, Snoop, Mary J. Blige, Kanye West and Common. Then there are the tracks produced by Babyface and Timbaland. Homeboy even thanks Oprah in the liner notes. Think Foxx is connected? It makes sense: When you’re the…
Electronics are the new orchestras, at least insofar as they allow a standard three-piece like Slow Runner to fold in layers of interior and pockets of depth that only studious listening can completely excavate. Michael Flynn articulates with Rufus Wainwright weight on every phrase, a romantic bit of overkill that…
Tunnel Vision Brilliance could prompt purchases with its cover alone, as long as designers supplement its disturbing imagery (lumberjack-like Scott Reeder floating shirtless in amniotic fluid) with a sticker that reads “The solo debut from the bassist of Obsessed and Kyuss.” Like a more intimate expression of the latter band’s…
It’s likely that brothers Pete, Phil and Tony Lewis were on something — probably a lot of something — when they recorded RV Livin’. The disc feels gleefully inebriated, as if the alcoholic or chemical cocktails that fueled its creators somehow seeped into every song. The CD’s sound quality falls…
Buddy, let me tell you what: These here Railbenders are the real McCoy. For my money, these urban cowboys play some of the most authentic honky-tonk this side of Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys. And Showdown, their third full-length and first for the Texas-based Stag imprint, is by far…
Clear Static, Make-Up Sex (Maverick). Clear Static is bad, and not in a good way. With a puke-inducing mix of hipster fashion, Debbie Gibson-on-a-bad-day vocals and recycled ’80s rock, this teenage quintet is everything that’s wrong with major labels today. Props for gigging at the Viper Room at age thirteen,…
Hard Times Are in Fashion was one of the great surprises of last summer. After honing its emo chops, Koufax shook things up with its third record — an irresistibly hooky slab of dark, danceable rock. Like the Strokes forced to play Ben Folds and Psychedelic Furs covers, the feisty…
Pedal-steel-guitar sensation Robert Randolph owes much of his rapid rise over the past several years to a simple if seldom-stated fact: In the minds of many music fans, hot chops more than compensate for a lack of originality. Randolph, who appears at the Fillmore with the Motet, developed his pedal-steel…
If there’s any justice in the great beyond, a celebrated wuss like Kenny G will end up working the men’s room in hell, force-fed a never-ending diet of his own dreck, groveling for poop tips from Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Until that happens, radical jazz trio the Dead Kenny…
The sons of famous fathers start out several rungs higher on life’s ladder than do the rest of us, but this head start doesn’t guarantee superstardom, as the career of James McMurtry demonstrates. The singer-songwriter’s 1989 debut, Too Long in the Wasteland, appeared on a major label, Columbia, thanks largely…
Reggie and the Full Effect is like the composite scenester kid that’s been at the ass end of every good/ dumb punk-rock trend from the past five or six years. Songs Not To Get Married To is a VH1 special of “I Love Hot Topic Band T-Shirts” that ironically and…
Always the bridesmaid, never the bride: That might as well be Sevendust’s mantra. Although the Atlanta quintet is perpetually on the verge of breaking through, it’s never quite reached the status of past tourmates — Limp Bizkit, Creed, Drowning Pool and Incubus — that have leapfrogged the act both critically…
Like the Lisa Frank of youth crew hardcore, Good Clean Fun is a pigtail braid of butterflies and unicorns. Formed back in 1997 as a means to bring back positivism to posi-core, the D.C. outfit is as much a parody band as Jon Stewart is a news anchor. The act…
Some local bands are like runaway trains, picking up steam as they rocket toward inevitable whatever. Most, though, stumble along in fits and starts, hamstrung by speed bumps like school, jobs, lineup changes and the simple struggle to get good. The Hot House began a couple years ago as a…
The fact that drum-and-bass ever gained any kind of foothold at all in the States can largely be attributed to the efforts of a scruffy, lanky Irish immigrant named Darragh Guilfoyle, aka DJ Dara. A chief purveyor of the genre for more than a decade and co-owner of the famed…
Being single on Valentine’s Day is like being an orphan on Christmas: It sucks. The entire city turns pink, communication is degraded to sappy messages on little candy hearts, and everyone else is getting flowers at work. In other words, it’s a legitimate excuse to get tanked. Lone wolves can…
On the eve of the release of In Flames’ eighth studio album and an extensive tour of Europe and North America, Daniel Svensson is out for a quiet walk with his three-month-old daughter. With a two-year-old at home, too, Svensson, the intense and intimidating man who pummels the drum kit…
Everything’s coming up Roses these days for Nate Barnes and brothers Jake and Daniel Sproul. Three years after they banded together as Rose Hill Drive, they finally have a recording contract — a joint deal with SCI Fidelity Records, the label founded by Madison House and the String Cheese Incident,…
In club land, Misstress Barbara, the best-known alter ego of DJ Barbara Bonfiglio, is renowned for decking dancers with the hardest of hard techno. But on Come With Me…, her new (and very entertaining) mix disc on the Uncivilized World label, she’s softened up out of what she sees as…
Long before 22-year-old Efren Ramirez was getting three feet of air on his Sledgehammer or making all of Preston High School’s wildest dreams come true as Pedro Sanchez in Napoleon Dynamite, he was lugging crates of records around Los Angeles for his older brothers. Though he was well underage and…
All hail “Are You Gonna Go My Way.” That slice of ’70s-meets-’90s mass-market rock was a nice break from the sour-faced caterwauling of the “alternative” years. But Lenny Kravitz has far outstayed his welcome, and now he has debased himself for Absolut vodka. For slapping on the assless chaps and…
