The story starts like this: Five years ago, two sisters by the names of Adrienne the Anemone and Bethany the Barracuda decide to mix ornate, goth-shaded pop music with puppetry, sign language and a flair for sheer fantasy. Enlisting the aid of drummer Khattie the Katfish, the Austin-based outfit began…
Side projects often have a way of turning around and influencing the bigger bands that spawned them. The New Amsterdams is a prime example: Singer/guitarist Matt Pryor formed the group in 2000 as a vehicle for his more folky, delicate compositions, ones that didn’t quite fit into the emo-pop framework…
Unless you speak fluent Japanese, you’ll only understand about 5 percent of what Guitar Wolf’s frontman is screaming about — a garbled spew of vitriol peppered with smatterings of thickly accented English: “Baby! Baby! Fire Joe! Fuck you! Go! Go! Time machine! 1-2-3! Rock ‘n’ roll! Yeah!” The rest of…
Whether or not one magic slug from a lone gunman actually caused seven wounds between JFK and former Texas governor John Connally is something for conspiracy theorists to argue about until Bigfoot rides a unicorn to the next Skull and Bones blood ritual. For Pennsylvanian thrash outfit Single Bullet Theory,…
Right before Franz Ferdinand and the Arcade Fire came along and swiped its thunder, British Sea Power was poised to be the world’s foremost purveyor of angle-brandishing indie anthems. But not everyone forgot: The Nightmare Fighters have enthusiastically channeled British Sea’s arty post-punk and Ian Curtis-esque grumble into a promising…
Miami’s DJ Craze is one of the few turntablists to fully embrace dance music as a touring, full-fledged, drum-and-bass DJ. After winning the DMC world championships an unprecedented three times, he retired from competition and turned his attention to the tunes. Recognizing the myriad similarities between drum-and-bass and hip-hop, Craze…
It didn’t even cross my mind that people might perceive us as a bunch of drunks.” Sarah Rocereta, singer/guitarist of Stoli and the Beers, is far more pissed than she is wasted. It’s Friday night at the Cherry Pit, and her band just tore through a neck-snapping blur of primal…
Right now, Atlantic Records is giving the star treatment to San Diego’s Louis XIV, whose first full-length for the company, The Best Little Secrets Are Kept, hits stores on March 22. But what happens if the disc doesn’t sell 200,000 copies in its first week? Will Atlantic stick by the…
Francois Baptiste’s ability to multi-task rivals that of an air-traffic controller. It’s 6:30 p.m. Thursday, February 17, the first official night of All-Star weekend, and I’m sitting in the passenger seat of his silver Range Rover as we barrel down Speer Boulevard en route to his apartment. Baptiste has one…
Fabric is a very orderly label. The London-based imprint specializes in mix discs helmed by the likes of Doc Martin and Eddie Richards, with each release’s title consisting of the company’s name and digits establishing its place in the catalogue. CD twenty is a benchmark in the firm’s history, and…
Being at the top of the Wedding Present’s thank-you list may not be much of an honor. On Take Fountain, the revived Present’s first release in eight years, that prestigious spot is granted to Sally Murrell — former girlfriend of the band’s leader, David Gedge, and his longtime collaborator in…
On his third full-length, young German troubadour Maximilian Hecker sheds nearly all of the down-tempo, Thievery Corporation filigree of his first two albums, aiming instead for a record held together by spare piano chords, gravity-free vocals, and keyboards that sound like Eno on an ice floe. Think Rufus Wainwright pried…
Green has been attracting plaudits and brickbats ever since his days with the Moldy Peaches, when his repertoire was filled with songs like “Who’s Got the Crack?” His melodies can make the collected works of Raffi seem complex in comparison, yet his lyrics are as alternately dirty and quirky as…
For a band so obsessed with the chillier frontiers of experimental rock, Hood refuses to stay frozen. Cold House, from 2001, was a watermark for the English group, crystallizing its aqueous post-rock into a new, glitteringly austere form of pop. But where House enclosed its digital chisel work in claustrophobic…
Still mucking about with guitar-based animal sounds, Lone Rhino preservationist Adrian Belew casts a wide net over the other endangered species in the playful safari of his mind. But on this brief jungle outing, the guitar force that added so much punch to Talking Heads’ Remain in Light measures the…
For too many, country rock is equated with either the hangdog wheezing of fringe-jacketed troubadours like Gram Parsons or the mustachioed mush of the Eagles. But to Zach Boddicker, former guitarist of Fort Collins’s Drag the River, the term has way more of a shit-kicking connotation. Neon Steven is the…
If Ian Dury fronted a Sex Pistols cover band with a fake American accent, a group like Wanker might sound oddly familiar. Instead, its members sound like aged, insolent, faux-Anglican punkers from a parallel universe — say, a London-based New York Dolls tribute act that calls itself the Jerk Offs…
As the major-label feeding frenzy continues over bands that flaunt more hair dye than a local PTA chapter, more and more groups that should have experienced their growing pains on the indie circuit are finding themselves launched into the big leagues at Warped Tour velocity. Count Letter Kills among the…
The thumbprint of At the Drive-In will doubtless be leaving impressions on post-hardcore forever — but few pretenders to that throne possess as much energy, honesty and soul as Irradio. The San Diego quintet came together six years ago and has since released two albums, 2002’s Semantic Noise and last…
The only ones likely to file Hawthorne Heights under “must-hear” are those stressing over their SAT scores and potential prom dates. Even so, the Dayton, Ohio-based act is turning heads in the corporate world — well, at least in the head offices of its label, Victory Records. The group’s debut…
At a relatively young 37, Tab Benoit makes a strong case that white men can jump — or at least bend a blue note with conviction. On his latest effort, Fever for the Bayou, Benoit, who hails from the Louisiana delta, shakes, rattles and rolls through a tasty blend of…
Defending Ashlee Simpson is a full-time job these days. Tell the average person that 2004’s Autobiography, her debut album, is the Nevermind of the girlie-pop genre — which is faint praise, comparatively speaking, but praise, nonetheless — and you’ll wind up with an earful about lip-synching, acid reflux and her…
