Music

While We’re From Japan! would have you believe it’s from the Land of the Rising Sun, a far more likely birthplace would be Iceland — specifically, Sigur Rós’s garage. Raising more racket, if fewer goosebumps, than Jon Thor Birgisson and crew, the Portland group still evokes enough glacial grace and…

As long as musicians are on the right side of popular trends, they’re golden — but when such fads run their course, performers need a Plan B. Bassist Dan Schmid and keyboardist Dustin Lanker understand this necessity all too well. The pair were members of Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, a rock/ska…

For a certain kind of person, there’s nothing happier than really sad music. That’s where the National comes in. On the quintet’s latest critically lauded album, Alligator, Matt Berninger comes on like Bill Callahan fronting American Music Club, while brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Scott and Bryan Devendorf provide…

Congo-born Marie Daulne, founder of the beloved female ensemble Zap Mama, isn’t comfortable with being pigeonholed in the category of “world music,” but that doesn’t stop her from stirring the global melting pot on a daily basis. On Zap Mama’s latest effort, Ancestry in Progress, the group’s exotic vocal stylings…

Black Dice makes experimental electronic noise rock that’s been known to draw blood. Infamous for their visceral and assaulting live shows, brothers Eric and Bjorn Copeland — now joined by new drummer Aaron Warren — have produced more than their fair share of jarring, disorienting and disconcerting records in the…

The phrase “novelty act” comes with a lot of baggage, but it seems to apply nicely to Architecture in Helsinki. The Australian octet is wont to be wacky, flirty, whiny and twee — sometimes all at the same time. In 2004, four years after forming, the band released its debut…

The sense of unease was palpable at last year’s Franz Ferdinand performance at the Bluebird Theater. Hipster faces awash in confusion hinted at a deep and troubling inner turmoil. The dilemma? How to avoid shaking that ass, thus losing your resigned and superior mystique. Resistance proved futile. By the time…

In the tradition of post-rock outfits like Tortoise, Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tokyo’s Mono favors the hypnotic applications of tension and release. Combining aching melodies and dark undercurrents of distortion into a slow-building storm of thundering repetition, the formidable noise quartet seems determined to…

The six members of Barbez have a collaborative resumé that includes Brian Eno, David Byrne, the Boredoms, Two Foot Yard, Bang on a Can, the Sea and Cake, Guv’ner and Air. During their own highly theatrical performances, however, the Brooklyn-based chamber-punk outfit creates a pan-bohemian sound that pools from Argentine…

Say what you want about Cricket on the Hill, but Denver’s red-haired stepchild is still surviving in a town where venue promoters are more apt to go for each other’s throats than join hands in a moment of silence. Ah, the Cricket, where any unwashed, unseasoned and unknown local act…

Danny Williamson — or LTJ Bukem, as he’s known in the dance world — is one of the few electronic musicians around who can lay legitimate claim to the distinction of being a true innovator. Having gotten his start in London’s hard-core breakbeat scene at the dawn of the ’90s,…

Stuffed into a pair of oversized booths at Mickey Manor, the members of Ten Cent Redemption could pass as a support group for male pattern baldness. And from the sound of it, this isn’t the first time these follicly challenged musicians — vocalist/guitarist Rhett Lee, guitarist John Waggoner, drummer Bill…

God damn. Mountain air is thin. You already know this, right? Because unlike me — a confirmed city slicker who makes the trek to ski country once every five years, whether I need to or not — most people come to Colorado for the mountains. But this past weekend, I…

Less than two years after the takeoff of Get Born, Jet’s debut album, guitarist/vocalist Cameron Muncey is still flying high, and why not? Consider, for example, the impromptu songwriting session the group staged over New Year’s on the Caribbean island of Barbados. “We were there for a photo shoot for…

Reed expert Marshall Allen took over as bandleader for the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra in 1995. In its current fourteen-piece road act, the Ark still draws inspiration from ancient Egypt and science fiction. By phone from the late Ra’s house in Philadelphia, Allen, 81, discusses his old boss, space travel…

All hail Doctor Demento, who has carried the torch of the novelty song for many years. For we are not some dour Radiohead fan who requires stone-faced “important” music. But novelty can be taken too far, and Universal Records has abused the idea with its new album, Crazy Frog Presents…

Your biggest concern after listening to Get Some is whether your shower ought to be hot or cold. Kicking up a miasma of filthy noise and musky lust, Nashville Pussy’s fourth disc veers precisely zero degrees from its headlong rush into the depths of Dixie-fried porn punk. Still, the disc…

You have to concede a certain amount of praise automatically for the massive imaginative output in Princess Superstar’s My Machine, a dystopic sci-fi hip-hop concept album about a future celebrity who takes over the world with the help of a cloning machine. As in any good epic, apocalyptic replicant war…

For decades, each okay-but-not-great Stones CD has inspired the inevitable Rolling Stone review that declares it to be masterful — hence the mag’s recent four-and-a-half-star rave, in which writer Alan Light said the disc recalled “rough, underrated” albums such as Dirty Work and Emotional Rescue. Both of which were okay…

Seventeen-year-old Teairra Mari’s airy but rock-solid soprano and wanton girl-next-door charm have earned her the title “Princess of the Roc” and landed her a spot in Jay-Z’s Midas whip. And for that she can thank her lyricist dudes: They’ve got teen-anxiety zeitgeist down. Teairra tears through juicy jilted-girl anthems, as…

Highland Mountain Boys Johnny Crow needs to keep his good gal separate from his side gal. See, Sassy is the sort of jealous six-string who gets uppity and slips out of tune any time Johnny’s eye starts a-rovin’, especially in the direction of Classy, that twelve-string, home-wreckin’ hound bitch. But…