Clear Static, Make-Up Sex (Maverick). Clear Static is bad, and not in a good way. With a puke-inducing mix of hipster fashion, Debbie Gibson-on-a-bad-day vocals and recycled ’80s rock, this teenage quintet is everything that’s wrong with major labels today. Props for gigging at the Viper Room at age thirteen,…
Hard Times Are in Fashion was one of the great surprises of last summer. After honing its emo chops, Koufax shook things up with its third record — an irresistibly hooky slab of dark, danceable rock. Like the Strokes forced to play Ben Folds and Psychedelic Furs covers, the feisty…
Pedal-steel-guitar sensation Robert Randolph owes much of his rapid rise over the past several years to a simple if seldom-stated fact: In the minds of many music fans, hot chops more than compensate for a lack of originality. Randolph, who appears at the Fillmore with the Motet, developed his pedal-steel…
If there’s any justice in the great beyond, a celebrated wuss like Kenny G will end up working the men’s room in hell, force-fed a never-ending diet of his own dreck, groveling for poop tips from Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Until that happens, radical jazz trio the Dead Kenny…
The sons of famous fathers start out several rungs higher on life’s ladder than do the rest of us, but this head start doesn’t guarantee superstardom, as the career of James McMurtry demonstrates. The singer-songwriter’s 1989 debut, Too Long in the Wasteland, appeared on a major label, Columbia, thanks largely…
Reggie and the Full Effect is like the composite scenester kid that’s been at the ass end of every good/ dumb punk-rock trend from the past five or six years. Songs Not To Get Married To is a VH1 special of “I Love Hot Topic Band T-Shirts” that ironically and…
Always the bridesmaid, never the bride: That might as well be Sevendust’s mantra. Although the Atlanta quintet is perpetually on the verge of breaking through, it’s never quite reached the status of past tourmates — Limp Bizkit, Creed, Drowning Pool and Incubus — that have leapfrogged the act both critically…
Like the Lisa Frank of youth crew hardcore, Good Clean Fun is a pigtail braid of butterflies and unicorns. Formed back in 1997 as a means to bring back positivism to posi-core, the D.C. outfit is as much a parody band as Jon Stewart is a news anchor. The act…
Some local bands are like runaway trains, picking up steam as they rocket toward inevitable whatever. Most, though, stumble along in fits and starts, hamstrung by speed bumps like school, jobs, lineup changes and the simple struggle to get good. The Hot House began a couple years ago as a…
The fact that drum-and-bass ever gained any kind of foothold at all in the States can largely be attributed to the efforts of a scruffy, lanky Irish immigrant named Darragh Guilfoyle, aka DJ Dara. A chief purveyor of the genre for more than a decade and co-owner of the famed…
On the eve of the release of In Flames’ eighth studio album and an extensive tour of Europe and North America, Daniel Svensson is out for a quiet walk with his three-month-old daughter. With a two-year-old at home, too, Svensson, the intense and intimidating man who pummels the drum kit…
Everything’s coming up Roses these days for Nate Barnes and brothers Jake and Daniel Sproul. Three years after they banded together as Rose Hill Drive, they finally have a recording contract — a joint deal with SCI Fidelity Records, the label founded by Madison House and the String Cheese Incident,…
In club land, Misstress Barbara, the best-known alter ego of DJ Barbara Bonfiglio, is renowned for decking dancers with the hardest of hard techno. But on Come With Me…, her new (and very entertaining) mix disc on the Uncivilized World label, she’s softened up out of what she sees as…
Long before 22-year-old Efren Ramirez was getting three feet of air on his Sledgehammer or making all of Preston High School’s wildest dreams come true as Pedro Sanchez in Napoleon Dynamite, he was lugging crates of records around Los Angeles for his older brothers. Though he was well underage and…
All hail “Are You Gonna Go My Way.” That slice of ’70s-meets-’90s mass-market rock was a nice break from the sour-faced caterwauling of the “alternative” years. But Lenny Kravitz has far outstayed his welcome, and now he has debased himself for Absolut vodka. For slapping on the assless chaps and…
An Angle’s Kris Anaya knows how to stick to a theme. The name of the latest disc by his “band” (a rotating lineup of pals and co-conspirators) is We Can Breathe Under Alcohol, and to make sure no one thinks the title was chosen at random, he kicks off “Green…
As disciples of the same Georgia music scene that spawned Col. Bruce Hampton and Widespread Panic, Outformation embraces the philosophy that rock can be both inventive and down to earth. Known for lead guitarist and vocalist Sam Holt’s ties to Panic (he doubles as a guitar tech for the act),…
Standing somewhere between the root pop of Poi Dog Pondering and a Louisiana zydeco outing, Donna the Buffalo serves up a simmering blend of Cajun, folk, rock and even country-tinged fare. The road-tested group weaves these influences together for an eminently enjoyable oeuvre that it’s been forging for nearly two…
You can’t really soften up the image of a train, but you can power a train on 4/4 and 6/8 rhythms and keep it rolling on tingly mandolins, chilly violins and the rollicking ramblings of dobro, guitar and banjo. A big powerhouse train with an enormous heart — that’s Railroad…
Banyan is an alt-rock graveyard for musicians from the era of Cindy Crawford, Wayne’s World and those nonsensical No Fear T-shirts. Tagged — and printed on every one of its albums — as the brainchild of former Jane’s Addiction/Porno for Pyros drummer Stephen Perkins, the supergroup has featured such blasts…
The last album from experimental duo George & Caplin, the self-released Electronic Eulogy (From Morse Code Infinity), was a powerful and tempo-changing burst of introspective energy that strategically employed minimalist vocals for ambience. Although equally sparse, the hushed, monotone vocals that appear on a handful of tracks on Things Past…
During a 1998 interview with Westword, Kool Keith came across as so generally unhinged that he seemed well on his way to becoming a permanent resident of a mental ward. But surprise, surprise: Although Keith hasn’t turned into “Black Elvis,” as he predicted on a 1999 album, he’s still offering…
