In 2005, pop music was rock music. Between Kelly Clarkson’s tarted-up “Since U Been Gone,” Ashlee Simpson’s raspy, Courtney-Love-after-a-bender vocals and Hilary Duff’s collabs with her Good Charlotte boy toy Joel Madden, even the biggest Top 40 starlets liked their guitars cranked up to a sassy eleven. Elsewhere, rockers in…
Although Decemberists vocalist Colin Meloy went on a solo tour this past winter, Picaresque, the Portland, Oregon, band’s third album, is arguably its lushest yet. The nuanced production of Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla finally matches Meloy’s obsession with detail: Horns, strings and accordion drift in and out of…
In a recent New York Times article that disputes the age-old link between creativity and depression, author Peter D. Kramer claims that it is “depression — and not resistance to it or recovery from it — that diminishes the self.” Devoted acolytes of Nine Inch Nails majordomo Trent Reznor would…
Tori Amos perfected her ability to combine creative risks with emotional introspection on early discs such as 1996’s Boys for Pele, which struck a welcome balance between modern flash and old-fashioned sentimentality. But with her more recent, experimental albums, listeners felt curiously removed from the flame-haired faerie queen, largely because…
On its major-label debut, Death Cab captures flashbulb moments of melancholy — the dissolution of a summer romance, growing apart from a lover, being dumped — and analyzes them with astounding honesty. Take the tear-inducing “What Sarah Said”: Solitary piano chords drive a vivid depiction of a sterile hospital where…
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,…
The only ones likely to file Hawthorne Heights under “must-hear” are those stressing over their SAT scores and potential prom dates. Even so, the Dayton, Ohio-based act is turning heads in the corporate world — well, at least in the head offices of its label, Victory Records. The group’s debut…
As the major-label feeding frenzy continues over bands that flaunt more hair dye than a local PTA chapter, more and more groups that should have experienced their growing pains on the indie circuit are finding themselves launched into the big leagues at Warped Tour velocity. Count Letter Kills among the…
In an age in which the concept of women fronting punk bands is still (frustratingly) a cute novelty, Tsunami Bomb defiantly transcends gender and style. Blame this on the swift evolution of the Bay Area quartet, over the course of two albums and a smattering of EPs, from a Gwen-Stefani-fronting-the-Misfits…
Naming his band’s live album Nobody’s Watching Nobody’s Listening sums up the wry humor of Joe Pernice, who remains forever genial about the Pernice Brothers’ freedom from big-label maneuvering and mainstream concessions. Still, this live document of a 2004 Mercury Lounge show in NYC demonstrates that members of the Boston…
The beauty of James Murphy’s early LCD Soundsystem singles like “Losing My Edge” was the way they simultaneously awarded him hipster credentials and mocked the indier-than-thou attitude that came with such a rarefied reputation. This knowing irony of being an outsider tapped for inner-sanctum inclusion permeates the first song on…
Austin gear-destroyer ŠAnd You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead is one of those bands signed to a major label not for commercial viability, but for street cred. Like Sonic Youth — from whose fakebook Trail of Dead notoriously borrowed more than a few pages for 2002’s Source…
Judging from the last presidential election, not many Americans are ready to make Will and Grace as welcome in their neighborhoods as Ozzie and Harriet. The passage of legislation to tighten the definition of marriage suggests that being out of the closet in America may be acceptable only as long…
In 2004, the line between indie and mainstream rock disintegrated even faster than Britney Spears’s quickie Vegas marriage. Vinyl obsessives mingled with white-hat-wearing fratheads at Modest Mouse shows, Taking Back Sunday debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard charts, and Death Cab for Cutie earned O.C.-sanctioned buzz and a major-label…
If Sum 41 sounds hardened on its fourth album, there’s good reason: The title refers to the name of a United Nations volunteer who helped the Canadian punk pranksters dodge bullets and explosions in the Congo, where the group was on a charity mission in 2003. The bandmembers haven’t totally…
John Kerry only wishes he was in Guster. Sure, the Massachusetts senator hasn’t done too shabbily on his own merits. But when it comes to building a rabid base of loyal supporters, he could learn a trick or two from his Boston neighbors. Hordes of Guster admirers follow the band…
When Robert Smith commissioned his nieces and nephews to scribble the artwork for the Cure’s new self-titled album, he had three simple requests for them: Draw a good dream; draw a bad dream; and make sure to include the words “The Cure.” The results resemble the scrawled art parents lovingly…
After forming in 1997, the Blood Brothers — co-vocalists, Johnny Whitney and Jordan Billie, guitarist Cody Votolato, bassist Morgan Henderson and Mark Gajadhar on drums — released two speeding blasts of discordant noise-punk, 2000’s This Adultery Is Ripe and the following year’s March on Electric Children. The group (right) then…
Good Charlotte is one of the biggest bands in the nation right now, a pop-punk quintet that’s played the MTV Video Music Awards, graced the cover of Rolling Stone and sold over three million copies of its latest disc, The Young and the Hopeless. To Good Charlotte vocalist Joel Madden,…
