Martin Sexton is the central character in one of those bootstrapping success stories Americans love. The performer, who began his career by busking on Boston street corners, has built a supportive fan base of thousands across the nation while remaining independent of the machine that perpetuates mediocre talents better suited…
The improvement in home-recording technology has caused an explosion of material from bedroom auteurs. But a not-so-funny thing often happens on the way to the iBook. Many performers spend so much time polishing their sonic rocket that their finished products sound slick and lifeless, thereby reducing the initial spark of…
Like St. Francis Xavier in a coonskin cap, Fruit Bats frontman Eric Johnson has a way with animals: For starters, dancing moths, honeybees, fireflies, mastadons, mountain goats, chestnut mares, poison frogs and bison herds are all over Echolocation. But while a mismatched menagerie inspires his sweetly rendered retreats from big-city…
If this is all Bloom has to say after a more than two-year break from releasing new original material, he may as well take another extended hiatus. Although eminently listenable in a chamomile-sipping, NPR sort of way, there’s little here worth hearing for anyone but diehard Luka lovers. The most…
Thirty years before O Brother, Where Art Thou?, there was the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle be Unbroken. Released as a lavish three-record set in 1972, a time when country music was desperately trying to shed its hillbilly image — the Grand Ole Opry had fled to the…
It’s safe to say that Fancy — a weeklong celebration of sound and style that kicks off in these parts on Sunday, April 21 — has very little to do with Fashion Week, which is held in Paris each spring. Now in its sixth year, Fancy probably won’t attract too…
Given that Merle Haggard marked his 65th birthday earlier this month, no one would brand him a slacker if he decided to call it a career. Fortunately, though, Bakersfield’s favorite son, who headlines at the Fillmore Auditorium on Sunday, April 21, isn’t the retiring sort, and despite his vintage, he’s…
Ron Jeremy will be so proud. Dead Heaven Cowboys’ tribute to the star appears on their first CD, Conversations in the Flood, which sees release Friday, April 19, at Herman’s Hideaway. Since forming last year, the Cowboys have paid their dues in venues from Cricket on the Hill and the…
Sara Hickman didn’t set out to be a crusading-mommy musician and ever-smiling feminist icon. That’s just how the cards have fallen over the course of her career. In addition to being a devoted wife and the mother of two young girls, Hickman has her own record label, Sleeveless, and manages…
Disco sucks” are fighting words to the finely honed ears of Charles Fields, widely known in the world of house music as DJ Feelgood. As a child growing up in Baltimore during the ’70s, Fields was often awakened early in the morning by his father blasting current club hits on…
Few artists are as confounding as Neil Young. Days after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Young performed a stirring version of John Lennon’s utopian anthem “Imagine” on the solemn America: Tribute to Heroes telethon. Then he quickly recorded (and released to radio) “Let’s Roll,” his…
Back when “grunge” was the hottest buzzword in rock — and not yet a term that those desperate to seem hip know better than to mention — major-label reps attending the annual South by Southwest music confab specialized in seducing credible underground acts who had no chance of selling discs…
For two decades, lead singer Greg Graffin and his troops have been soldiering on, watching waves of trends break off the Bad Religion bulwarks as they fortified a melodic hardcore formula. Sure, their music is fast, loud, and hummable; it is pop-punk, after all. But Bad Religion has always cast…
In 1974 and 1975, when the dynamic arranger and bandleader Gil Evans set out to reinterpret the music of rock icon Jimi Hendrix, jazz purists cried foul. What in the world was Miles Davis’s brilliant collaborator, a man who’d written songs for Peggy Lee and conducted albums for Kenny Burrell,…
Lexington, Kentucky, is a smallish city smack dab in the middle of the South. It is home to the University of Kentucky, several Civil War museums and a whole lot of horses, hence its nickname: The Horse Capital of the World. At last count, the population was 260,512. Get ready…
The Brooklyn-based rap quartet Anti-Pop Consortium, Tuesday, April 16, at the Bluebird Theater, cites influences as diverse as goth rockers Bauhaus, Joy Division and the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson. This eclecticism and willingness to transcend musical boundaries have endeared the group to Thom Yorke, who asked the Consortium…
“Just when you thought it was over, it happens again.” So sings Eliot Zizic on Auditory Crash Course, the debut EP from Denver’s DeNunzio. Truer words were never spoken — especially for this young group, made up of three members of the late, lamented local staple Acrobat Down. Zizic, Jason…
Begun as a collaboration with guitarist and songwriter Stephen Taylor, Wovenhand currently serves as a sort of creative repository for David Eugene Edwards, the enigmatic leader of 16 Horsepower. With Wovenhand, Edwards strips away the dense and dark instrumentation that characterizes his regular band to offer a more full glimpse…
Does Robert Schneider have ants in his pants, or is he merely a preternaturally active guy who just can’t stop making music? The Apples in Stereo frontman, producer, guest-star extraordinaire and intermittent cartoon character will provide audiences a chance to decide for themselves on Thursday, April 4, at the Lion’s…
Over the past four years, the Faint has been quietly developing a new-wave sound that harks back to the golden era of ’80s pop, all analog synthesizers, danceable beats and snotty lyrics. Some who’ve followed the band’s progression — from an unknown Omaha act to an indie phenomenon currently selling…
For many of the performers who shlep down to Austin for the South by Southwest Music Conference and Festival each year in search of that elusive label deal, the effort rarely amounts to more than a long journey back to Mississauga, Canada, or Aliceville, Alabama, or Dayton, Ohio, or Vienna,…
True confessions time: I found 1995’s Jagged Little Pill, Morissette’s blockbuster first album, to be about as much fun as a sesame seed wedged so tightly between two teeth that no amount of flossing can dislodge it. Likewise, the 1999 McNichols Arena concert the warbler headlined in support of disc…
