Babyface knows a thing or two about catching flies with sugar. He almost single-handedly sweetened ’90s pop music with a string of hits that delighted audiences and angered critics. The then-derided, now-ignored and consequently underrated super-songwriter/producer’s seventh album, Grown & Sexy, is a tasty, subtle rebuttal to pop culture’s youth…
Sometimes you have to wonder if artists name their records with the intention of baiting critics. Yes, Resilience is the title of the eighth album in as many years by San Diego’s Miguel Depedro, otherwise known as Kid 606; instead of his typically abrasive mash-ups of pop-culture carrion and splattered…
The Procussions’ Japan-only EP, Up All Night, garnered so much attention that the Colorado-born, Los Angeles-ized trio has added four new songs for an upcoming stateside full-length release. With only two of eleven tracks featuring all three MCs (Stro the 89th Key, Mr. J Medeiros and Resonant), this project is…
Dana Landry, who heads the jazz program at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, isn’t some creaky relic who found refuge in academia after his skills deteriorated. Rather, he’s an engaging pianist whose latest long-player, which is being celebrated during a Friday, August 12, CD-release party at Dazzle, swings…
Jason Mraz, Mr. A-Z (Atlantic). Jason Mraz’s sojourn through the alphabet pauses lengthily on “S” — for “schizophrenic.” Among mountains of spastic lyrics, bizarre operatic bursts, unfortunate free flows and ill-fitting flamenco guitar, the album feels as disjointed as a circus freak. Worse, Mraz sings vainly about avoiding a “sophomore…
Eric Sanko’s avant-garde rap sheet could damn near wallpaper New York’s Knitting Factory: In addition to collaborations with Yoko Ono, John Cale and Basketball Diaries author Jim Carroll, Sanko spent seventeen years in the rhythm section of John Lurie’s acclaimed Lounge Lizards. Still part of the Big Apple’s subterranean scenery,…
There’s something for everyone in Seattle’s Kinski — assuming everyone likes freaked-out, molar-cracking instrumental guitar rock. Lucy Atkinson, Matthew Reid-Schwartz, Barrett Wilke and Chris Martin combine elements of space rock, kraut rock, avant rock, psych rock and prog rock — along with good, old-fashioned hard rock — into intricate compositions…
In May, Time, a magazine whose dedication to indie rock is on par with Cooking Light’s commitment to covering geopolitics, devoted an entire feature to Spoon. The Time-ing was hard to figure, since the Austin-based combo had been around for eleven years by then and was an odds-on favorite to…
Who would have thought that blackhearted Rob Zombie had a soft spot for honky-tonk? Then again, when you’re making a movie about flesh-eating rednecks, a taste for forlorn pedal steel seems oddly apropos. Enter Texas rockabilly veteran Jesse Dayton: Commissioned to write music for Zombie’s splatterfest, The Devil’s Rejects, Dayton…
Shoegazer? Not exactly. During Sybris’s first show in its native Chicago two years ago, lead singer and guitarist Angela Mullenhour got so excited that one of her shoes flew off into the crowd. Likewise, the young quartet’s eponymous debut — recently released on the Flameshovel imprint, home to fellow art-pop…
With his musical hatchery now washed out, Trey Anastasio is back to swimming solo. Not that that’s a bad thing, by any means. Anastasio’s past extra-Phishular projects have included stints with Phil Lesh and Friends, as well as an acclaimed outing with power trio Oysterhead, which featured Anastasio alongside Les…
This past March, during a packed set at South by Southwest, Ben Lee gratefully exclaimed, “We’re just so fucking lucky to have music!” — without a trace of sarcasm or irony. That same joyfulness endeared the 26-year-old Australian to alt-rock grandpas Thurston Moore and Mike D of the Beastie Boys,…
Amadeus Tonguefingers (who files his taxes under the name Dave Colberg) once described the wildly experimental sound of Robot Mandala as “a little to the left of techno, a little to the right of space rock, and right down the middle of sonic noise soundscapes.” While that’s a helpful aural…
Jon Bishop got his start when electronic music was still a very underground phenomenon. Spinning house and techno in warehouses and outdoor events throughout California, the San Diego-based jock was at the forefront of the burgeoning rave scene in 1990. Bishop made his name at San Diego’s Club Hedonism, which…
When we first started playing,” Ben Gun remembers, “we started getting labeled ‘stoner rock,’ and we were all kind of like, ‘We don’t want to be labeled stoner rock. We’re not really stoner rock.'” Stoner rock is a contemptible term created to describe a no-frills, anachronistic sound that emerged in…
A mid-July teleconference with Nikki Sixx, Mick Mars and Vince Neil of Mtley Cre provided plenty of answers to the question “Why does mainstream rock journalism suck so hard?” Granted, the chat’s organizers tried to limit inquiries to the most predictable, least entertaining subjects: the band’s Live 8 performance in…
When Alf greets me at the rear entrance of the Deathstar and leads me up to KTCL’s studio, where he hosts Locals Only, he looks different than I remember. The last time I saw him, he was considerably hairier, yucking it up with Terry Bradshaw on TV in that dude-I-swear-I’m-just-doing-this-because-they’re-paying-me…
Mazarin’s We’re Already There hypnotizes with songs built on a bedrock of sculpted noise and drum rhythms that form a snaking maze of syncopation on each track. Lead singer Quentin Stoltzfusike croons with a melodically muffled tenor, sweet and crumbly — like Robyn Hitchcock with all the limey scraped out…
Elitists may dismiss discs in the Now That’s What I Call Music series as K-Tel comps for the new millennium, but they’re actually a clever response to the downloading age. With songs so easily available individually, rather than bundled in baker’s dozens, NOW’s mix-disc approach is a lot more varied…
Aye, matey. Ye olde accoutrements of seafaring days gone by — mermaids, sea captains, galleons and the like — have become the aural calling cards of the eccentric Portland, Oregon, band called the Decemberists. There is the whiff of days of yore about them, ’tis true, especially on the recently…
Suites: those ornate, flowery compositions that bluebloods in powdered wigs used to listen to between bouts of beheading peasants. Sweets: the sucrose-saturated foodstuffs that make your tooth enamel turn to crud. The two homophones neatly bracket Spelled in Bones, the third full-length by Chicago’s Fruit Bats. Mainly the brainchild of…
“Trance blues” is Otis Taylor’s catchphrase for his sixth record, Below the Fold. And he ought to know: After an up-and-down career that’s spanned nearly four decades, he’s refined his droning, modal blues and hypnotizing groan to a science. But that’s not to imply that Below is short on soul…
