Music

At the Austin airport a couple of weeks ago, heading home from South by Southwest, I ran into my buddy Iron Mike — who looked like fifty miles of bad road. I’d last seen him a few nights earlier in the midst of an epic bender, when he was pleading…

Sea Change, Beck’s previous release, was the sort of album rock journos love: an ambitious song cycle whose thoughtful lyrics could be quoted in reviews to demonstrate the tunesmith’s blossoming artistic maturity. As a result, the disc received rapturous notices, even though the music on it was so drearily monochromatic…

Mercifully, very little has changed since Radar Bros. gave us And the Surrounding Mountains, a majestic Barrett-meets-Beatles slab of dreamy pop. On The Fallen Leaf Pages, head moper Jim Putnam still pens opulent, melancholic waltzes that would fit right in on Pink Floyd’s Meddle. And he still spends countless hours…

The Locust makes shitty albums. The anarchic San Diego quartet just can’t sustain interest for any prolonged period of time; its most compelling stuff has always been found crammed onto one side of split seven-inch singles. 2003’s disastrously dull Plague Soundscapes was the perfect example of the group’s full-length entropy…

Being the protegé of someone famous offers obvious advantages, especially in the earliest stages of an artist’s career. The rub arises when the junior performer tries to stand alone — or, in the case of Tweet, a songstress under Missy Elliott’s wing, fly solo. It’s Me Again, Tweet’s second album,…

It’s funny, but for as long as Ian MacKaye has been making incredible, vastly influential music, no one’s really stopped to think of him as a songwriter. Of course, isolating his contributions to Fugazi isn’t easy. The band has long thrived on an almost telepathic symbiosis, with MacKaye and fellow…

Musical gimmicks are like trying to pass off a dildo as your own equipment: You’re going to have to fuck some pretty stupid people in order to get the last laugh. Edie Sedgwick, aka Justin Moyer, takes his name from a dead debutante who moonlighted as one of Andy Warhol’s…

Cephalic Carnage’s last album, 2002’s Lucid Interval, should have been its masterpiece. But the group was hamstrung by its own precision; sterile and dryly processed, the recording seemed more like a slick exercise than a grueling grindcore ordeal. Anomalies, though, delivers the blood and guts Lucid lacked — and then…

Still refusing to limit himself to Western music’s twelve-tone scale, string-bender Neil Haverstick further explores unconventional tuning systems with a fresh batch of instrumental compositions for custom-built 19- and 34-tone guitars. Accompanied by longtime collaborator Ernie Crews on drums and percussion, Haverstick keeps his fifth release playful and unpredictable, referencing…

The compulsion to mention that the Soundtrack of Our Lives is from Sweden is like that irresistible urge to tell someone where you are when you’re on a cell phone. Despite the fact’s irrelevance, the conversation seems incomplete without it. After all, there’s nothing particularly “Swedish” about this grungy, shiny…

With bluegrass instrumentation tucked into the context of straight-up rock tunes, sing-along pop and They Might Be Giants-style goofenannies, the Clumsy Lovers’ “raging bluegrass Celtic rock” is guaranteed to get your next party started right, whether it’s in Dublin, Durham or Denver. Like the missing link between Bill Monroe and…

Shitting and dying: Somewhere between these two smelliest of biological inevitabilities lies the music of Man Man. The Philadelphia trio slings a mixed satchel of keyboards, trumpets, marimbas, guitars and twitchy percussion, taking aim at just about every left-field style of sonic esoterica imaginable: post-punk, merengue, klezmer, pop, doo-wop, jazz…

If soul is the teacher and punk is the preacher, the BellRays are working a double shift. Combining Detroit’s twin musical heritages, Motown and garage rock, the Riverside, California, foursome specializes in a unique brand of primal, big-lunged gospel fury — one that showcases the woefully underrated and formidable pipes…

Retro trends, like most fads, follow a predictable pattern. The first purveyors of a nostalgia-friendly sound seem fresh in a comfortably familiar way, and the affection they earn brings other artists of their ilk to prominence. At a certain point, though, the number of bands using the formula exceeds the…

Many people have tried to turn Robyn Hitchcock into a star over the years, including Jonathan Demme, who placed him at the center of Storefront Hitchcock, a quirky 1998 performance film, and gave him a small but key role in the recent remake of The Manchurian Candidate. Unfortunately, Hitchcock’s obsession…

It’s pretty apparent that Ambulance LTD has a thing for the Beatles, since every third song on LP, the act’s debut, sounds like an experimental reworking of “Dear Prudence.” But despite any derivative tendencies, the Brooklyn-based four-piece transcends its schoolgirl crush on the “White Album” to embrace every ornately sophisticated…

Atmosphere and gravity: two invisible, intangible things that keep us alive even as they imprison us. Strangers Die Everyday is well versed in this contradiction; the Boulder quartet uses bass, drums, cello and violin in its attempt to simultaneously harness and succumb to these vast, pervasive forces. Begun in late…

In 2002, Junkie XL, the brainchild of Tom Holkenborg, reworked an old Elvis cut into an inescapable dance track that shot straight to number one in 24 countries, especially noteworthy for an electronic artist. The track, “A Little Less Conversation,” also exemplified Junkie XL’s signature sound, a potent sonic infusion…

When it comes to Fatboy Slim, British musician Norman Cook’s disc-spinning alter ego, U.S. dance scenesters are split. One camp sees him as a terrifically entertaining personality who’s introduced untold thousands of tailfeather shakers to a vibrant type of music. The other reviles him as a performer who’s sold out…

“Hey, get off the thin ice! Geez!” Zak Sally of Low is yelling at his dog. It’s an unseasonably warm winter day in Duluth, Minnesota, and the bassist is multi-tasking — cell phone in one hand, leash in the other. “I’m at the park,” he explains. “It thawed yesterday, so…

This week, twenty or so local artists will invade Austin for the 2005 incarnation of South by Southwest. For those keeping score, that’s roughly quadruple the number of Denver-area acts that showcased there in 2004. Good for us — and about time. As cool as Mootown’s showing sounds, though, earning…