Compilations like Juke Joint II are the DiGiorno of mixes, culled with such impeccable taste of inspiring breadth that it sounds like your music-obsessive friend could be mixing it live in your living room. Normally, buying such mixes seems like a lazy shortcut; if the groups are good, you buy…
Contrary to popular belief, Dashboard Confessional frontman Chris Carrabba is one of the ballsiest men in music. That statement might seem absurd, considering that…well, he’s Chris Carrabba, for chrissake. But during the first part of the decade, when critics and other musicians were busy distancing themselves from emo’s fallout, the…
On Coming Up to Sunshine, Adenbrooke has melded equal parts punk attitude, alternative apathy and hardcore noise to create a sound that can best be described as post-mall rock. The six songs that make up Sunshine center on the transition from adolescence to adulthood and the confusion that brings. The…
On the de facto title track of Ten Tiers’ latest, group leader Jonathan Tiersten sings about slipping “into the comforts of drunkenness” — an appropriate phrase, given the intriguingly woozy, off-kilter tenor of the EP as a whole. The disc stumbles at times, but somehow manages to remain upright. Take…
Body Count, Murder 4 Hire (Escapi Music). Fourteen years after infuriating law enforcement by releasing “Cop Killer” — ironic, considering that Ice-T wound up playing a cop on Law and Order: SVU — Body Count is back. The musical formula is the same, but this time war, rather than the…
Few artists have ventured on as varied a path as Carla Bozulich. Emerging from Los Angeles’s post-punk scene during the ’80s, Bozulich was a member of the industrial dance act Ethyl Meatplow and, later, the more famous and rootsy Geraldine Fibbers. When the latter group disbanded in the late ’90s,…
I’ve had a bad day. Actually, this particular “Bad Day” has lasted more than five months, repeating over and over and over again, like Groundhog Day. It started back in February, when I was flying to Los Angeles on a plane that had those little TVs installed on the backs…
Yeah, I know: terrible band name. But don’t let a lousy handle prevent you from discovering Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s. This Indianapolis-based outfit is typically lumped into the folk genre — a classification that falls well short of describing the material on their latest disc, The Dust…
Yellowcard belongs to the very exclusive club of emo-leaning pop-punk bands that are named after soccer violations and feature a violinist who does on-stage backflips. Gymnastics aside, though, the presence of Sean Mackin (the Itzhak Perlman of the Warped Tour set) is hardly a gimmick; his adroit bow-handling adds buckets…
On their eponymous debut, the Futureheads played like there was no tomorrow. The four-piece threw everything it had into its recordings. The result reflected the dangers of indie mod excess: artsy punk with a clever sense of humor and elaborate four-part harmonies run amok. News and Tributes, the band’s sophomore…
Like Green Day, Rancid was once reviled as a band of poseurs by much of the punk-rock intelligentsia, but is now seen as a standard-bearer for the genre — and sheer persistence is a big reason why. Early discs such as 1993’s Rancid and 1995’s And Out Come the Wolves…
Not since the Great Split of 1972 — when the Jefferson Airplane splintered into Hot Tuna and the Jefferson Starship (and, later, just Starship) — has debate raged so passionately about the co-existing offspring of a revered band. When At the Drive-In folded its tent in 2001, it spawned two…
Outside of having a really good acid trip while listening to a bootleg, Dark Star Orchestra is about the closest thing to a Grateful Dead resurrection that most Deadheads will experience in their lifetime. In 1997, the Dark Stars began faithfully re-creating Dead shows and have been lauded for their…
Just when you’re really getting into an act, it often seems to go the way of the dodo. A little more than a month after it was profiled in these pages, Kronow, a band that had gathered serious momentum in recent years and looked on the verge of breaking through,…
Ben Watt’s music career spans more than twenty years. As one half of London’s famed Everything but the Girl, Watt has sold millions of records worldwide with partner Tracey Thorn. In the mid-’90s, the act began dabbling in electronica, collaborating with producers such as house don Todd Terry and drum-and-bass…
Last night, the Fray appeared on the Tonight Show for the second time in six months — and just a week after the band was featured on the Late Show with David Letterman. The Fray played “How to Save a Life” — the title track from its debut — with…
Last month I profiled Dan Rutherford and Morning After Records, which had just partnered with Island Records (Beatdown, June 15). Although Rutherford’s young company is one of the area’s most high-profile, it’s far from the only locally based label. Here are a half-dozen more homegrown imprints putting out quality releases:…
Bob Morris has got his hands full tonight. His band, the Hush Sound, is slated to open for Fall Out Boy and the All-American Rejects at Chicago’s UIC Pavilion. Just prior to the hometown gig, as the guitarist/vocalist is being interviewed, his mother — who’s standing in line outside the…
According to drummer Wisam Alshaibi, three of the five troublemakers in the Blackout Pact are brothers in mediocrity. Years ago, Alshaibi was dumped by One Dying Wish “for not being good enough at playing drums,” he says, while guitarist Joe Ramirez and bassist B.J. Bailey were sacked by the musicians…
Andrew McMahon’s story is a Behind the Music executive producer’s wet dream. Soon after graduating from high school, the singer-songwriter-pianist scored a Drive-Thru Records deal with his Orange County, California, quintet, Something Corporate. Upon releasing their 2001 EP, Audioboxer, the emo-leaning piano-pop wavemakers were upstreamed into MCA Records (now part…
Jason Molina started out as an Iron Maiden-obsessed, bass-playing metal kid. At the same time, he was into Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. In the early ’90s, when his much older bandmates went off to college and got full-time jobs, Molina found himself searching for a way to…
Although the second album from All That Remains is a step up the evolutionary ladder, The Fall of Ideals suggests that one of indie metal’s most promising bands has reached a stalemate in terms of, well, ideas. Musically, the act has progressed nicely from the singular brashness found on its…
