Tuesday night at the Lion’s Lair might as well be a night in Antarctica. The place is desolate. A couple dozen patrons loll across the bar, which is already a half-inch deep with spilled Pabst. Even with the sparse attendance, it takes ten minutes to get a beer. You’d do…
Roll call at a Hackensaw Boys family reunion sounds like Cletus on The Simpsons gathering his kinfolk from yonder hollow: Pee Paw! Shiner! Mahlon! Skeeter! Jigsaw! Salvage! Dante J! C.B.! Uncle Blind Bobby! Kooky-Eyed Fox! Add a grizzled hound named Lulu and a few jugs of ‘shine, and the gathering…
Have you seen that new commercial on TV, the one where shit like stray basketballs and clumsy bicyclists and spurts of water from hoses start hitting the sides of a car? All those random thumps start speeding up and blurring together until they coalesce into a funky, polyrhythmic symphony of…
When Eminem emerged on the national scene, he seemed like such a market-driven creation — a pasty MC working overtime to shock clueless middlebrows — that I couldn’t believe his shtick would have much staying power. In April 1999, I committed this theory to print, predicting that he would “be…
The HorrorPops may look like the Cramps, but they’re more razor-edged pop than horror. The outfit’s parts fit together like Roger Corman’s Frankenstein — not quite as scary as hoped. The Concrete Blonde head of Souxsie Sioux is stitched onto the torso of Gwen Stefani. Dick Dale’s arms are added,…
Listening to Cassidy’s first two singles, “Hotel” and “Get No Better,” you might think Split Personality is full of club tracks. Thankfully, it’s not. But while Cassidy’s debut is imaginative at times — Personality is split into three sections with five songs each: Cassidy (the party club joints), Tha Problem…
Tom Burns is a music lover, not an attention seeker. For years, he’s quietly been issuing jazz discs from his Bailey headquarters on a pair of imprints, Capri and Tapestry. The recordings vary in quality and adventurousness from release to release, but as In the Pocket and Dreams Untold demonstrate,…
Listen up, all you would-be rap moguls: College is for suckers. Want to be a baller like Roc-A-Fella’s Damon Dash? Want to build an entertainment empire bigger than that of Russell Simmons? Then take heed: For a hip-hop education, the only relevant institution is the school of hard knocks. And…
It takes more than big beats to make a crowd shake it. Sure, kicking beefy 4/4 beats onto the floor is essential — but too many DJs, hip-hop producers, techno auteurs and dance-punk wannabes forget to sweeten the pot with anything resembling melody or feeling. It’s like the old carrot-and-stick…
As Plastikman’s protegé, Magda’s duties include warming up the planet’s Plastikheads by crafting wicked tracks for the reigning king of techno’s vanity label, m-nus. Making her name in Motor City, America’s techno capital, and hooking up with the all-goddess disc-jockey collective Women on Wax brought Magda to Richie Hawtin’s attention…
If you’re like me, the words “Christian metal” bring to mind visions of Stryper’s Michael Sweet strutting around the stage in leopard-print spandex, belting out hair-metal hymns. ZAO, however, ain’t your father’s Christian metal. Since its debut album in 1996, the group has created hard-hitting, truly heavy music with often…
John Roderick, the focal point of the Long Winters, gets by with a little help from some noteworthy friends on the band’s latest album, When I Pretend to Fall, released last year on the Barsuk imprint. The Posies’ Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow (who co-produced Fall), plus the Young Fresh…
Back in the Reagan years, pop acts with serious messages were more subtle — which meant you could still have fun and enjoy the music. The Fixx, a British band that hit these shores in 1982, won fans with a smart New Wave sound in hits you could either dance…
Ask Alice Gilbert what gets his rocks off, and he’ll tell you: pop music. More specifically, underground, independent pop music, the stuff that makes Modest Mouse look as pretentious and impenetrable as Proust. One such unassuming outfit is Bad Weather California, which just put out a self-titled, split EP with…
In electronic circles, Ali Shirazina, aka Dubfire (far right), and Sharam Tayebi are household names. These D.C.-based producers, known collectively as Deep Dish, are the remixers of choice for pop icons looking to reinvent themselves — and validate their forays into the dance world. They’ve already remixed material for Madonna,…
LoDo has lost its Lucky Star. The twinkling testament to the ’80s was recently snuffed out, becoming a part of the past — the Do Me Generation — that it celebrated so slavishly. What happened? The club’s lease expired, and the property’s owners decided against renewing it. Rumors are streaking…
I’m not interested in chamber pop. I don’t even know what that really means,” says songwriter Dan Bejar. “If it means, like, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or something, I don’t really listen to that. Chamber pop kind of bugs me.” As captain of the Vancouver-based vessel Destroyer, Bejar knows a thing or…
Whether we’re talking about the funky-fresh, breakin’, gold-chain hip-hop fans of the 1980s or the glow-stick, lollipopped PLUR set, music has always been as much about the community and culture surrounding it as the scales and octaves within it. Adapting to the times and new technology, the website-cum-record-label Okayplayer has…
Chris Carrabba once said that if he had heard Jonah Matranga’s Onelinedrawing records first, he might not have bothered to create Dashboard Confessional. Listening to The Volunteers, it’s easy to see what he meant. Like Carrabba, Matranga has done time as a rock-and-roll frontman, first leading the Sacramento-based outfit Far,…
Last month, T.I. was sentenced to three years in jail after violating his probation. And while the Atlanta-based rapper shares his rap sheet throughout his sophomore release, Trap Muzik, he also offers a bit of insight and advice. On “Doin’ My Job,” he muses that, like it or not, selling…
Heavy metal and bluegrass go together like angry steelworkers and precious little cucumber finger sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Nonetheless, the acoustic pluckers in Alabama’s Iron Horse take on the music of Metallica, to middling results. No doubt this horse knows its way around a dobro, a mando, a…
I’ve gotta be honest with you: This album pissed me off! Thumbs up for the cover, on which the Divine Miss B displays a hottie hairstyle, bare shoulders and a smile that seems to say, “Hey, sailor — plastic warms to the touch.” When I popped in the disc, though,…
