Being pimped by Little Steven and talked up by Bruce Springsteen is no easy feat. But both happened to Seattle’s Boss Martians last summer at Little Steven’s International Underground Garage Fest. The irony? The Martians’ music isn’t even garage rock. In fact, it’s something way greater: power pop in its…
He’s lived in caves, worn Lone Ranger masks on stage and made records that have sent legions of the politically correct running for the stop button. But despite the cartoon outlaw image that has grown up around David Allen Coe, it’s his myriad accomplishments as a songwriter, performer, author and…
Superstring Theory’s debut EP, Same Damn Story, was a promising if disjointed disc of small-budget electro-pop. The duo’s sophomore effort, Everything Before Now, follows exactly the same formula — only with bigger ambitions and a wider panorama. Like She Wants Revenge without the wrinkles, singer/guitarist Jeff Eyser and keyboardist/ programmer…
The guys in Rye Coalition are some dumb motherfuckers. Veterans of the early-’90s post-hardcore scene, they’ve witnessed tons of their contemporaries try to milk the major-label bull, only to get gored in the groin. But after a decade of humble independence, Rye signed to DreamWorks in 2003 and subsequently suffered…
The last time Astrophagus unleashed a CD, the outfit was known as the Moths, and its former bassist, Quentin Chirdon, was awaiting trial in Albuquerque on charges of armed robbery. But recently, singer/guitarist Jason Cain is the one who’s been logging some quality time in Oz. The frontman was arrested…
It’s been two and a half decades since Cocteau Twins concocted the formula, but there’s still something thrilling about a moody chanteuse backed by soaring, symphonic ambience. Headlights is the newest avatar of the form — and while its sound soars and sighs with the best of them, the trio…
At All Costs has a news flash for you: The American dream isn’t as rosy as it seems, and a bunch of big, bad men are making bank off the war against terror. Thankfully, the Austin-based quintet’s music is a little less obvious than its lyrical platitudes. It’s Time to…
“Most songs I write get stuck in my head/It’s ’cause I listen to them too much, I guess.” With lyrics like these, it sounds as though Hunter Dragon’s sole member, Joshua Hunter, spends a little too much time wearing playback headphones in his home studio. Some do-it-yourself discs get done…
Everything’s bad for you nowadays, and everything’s good: fat, meat, wine, carbs, caffeine. But while the medical community debates the comparative merits and perils of cardiovascular whatever, Eagles of Death Metal keep on making the greasiest high-calorie rock and roll conceivable. Death by Sexy is the second full-length from this…
The jazz vocalist was about as cool as the jazz accordion in the post-bop heyday of the ’50s and ’60s, but singers such as Abbie Lincoln, Nina Simone and Andy Bey loaned human faces and voices to that decade of avant-garde abstraction. And Bey is still keeping it real. After…
The word “orchestral” gets dropped every time some cruddy indie-rock band crams a tuba solo or two-part harmony into one of its songs. But few auteurs of underground pop have as much conceptual chutzpah as Dave Longstreth, the nucleus of the Dirty Projectors. Layered with beauty and skewered by weirdness,…
Liturgy comes in many shapes, from sacrament to the more prosaic forms of social ritual. Music, of course, is another. Still, few musicians are able to imbue their art with the kind of prescribed circularity that feels revelatory rather than lazy. With her debut full-length, Blank Unstaring Heirs of Doom,…
From dirty socks to Sybian machines, the thrill of autoeroticism finds its way into the weirdest outlets. Johnny Wohlfahrt alone is Nervesandgel, perhaps the most self-indulgent entity the Denver music scene has ever birthed. Recorded across four years and two full discs, his eponymous opus occupies the hitherto hidden space…
The worst thing about grandparents is having to listen to their stories over and over again. Garden Ruin marks Calexico’s tenth anniversary — a century in rock years — and proves that leader Joey Burns might finally be slipping into his songwriting dotage. The band has rehashed every possible element…
“Tree-hugger” has become an almost warmly pejorative term, conjuring images of feckless hippies and stoned CoPIRG canvassers on the 16th Street Mall. As such, it’s easy to forget the life-and-death struggle at the core of anti-logging movements, especially the one centered around the redwood forests of northern California. The area…
Nick Sullivan gives the impression that he could master just about any style of music he puts his mind to. Of course, that’s not always a plus: The history of popular music is littered with the corpses of chameleon-like virtuosos who never learned how to pick one genre and pour…
Last month, Henry Rollins was investigated by authorities after a fellow airline passenger glimpsed him reading Ahmed Rashid’s Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia. After all, what kind of sick terrorist sympathizer would want to educate himself about the world’s second-largest religion? Haram had better watch out:…
There’s nothing like an old-school death-rock show to bring the ghouls out of the woodwork. Expect nothing less than a parade of black lipstick and Deadly Nightshade Manic Panic when 45 Grave claws its way up from the underworld and takes the stage of the Bluebird. Led by singer Dinah…
Matson Jones’s new EP is basically a brick to keep the door propped open till the band’s sophomore full-length comes out, presumably later this year. As between-meal snacks go, though, it’s a filling one — and that’s not even counting all those empty carbs in the title. Each of the…
In case anyone forgot that Mudhoney leader Mark Arm’s true roots are in early-’80s hardcore, not grunge, here’s Under a Billion Suns, a disc whose worldview is as ensconced in Cold War geopolitics and nuclear hair-pulling as your average Dead Kennedys seven-inch. Musically, it’s not that distinguishable from its predecessor,…
When you call the first song of your demo “The Band That Was Sad About Something,” you’re really asking for it, especially when the song itself is as majestically moping as Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish or Spacemen 3 on a glucose drip. But is Quadramess the subject of its own song?…
It’s one to thing to say that Band of Horses is influenced by Built to Spill, the Flaming Lips and the Shins. But there isn’t a single sound on Everything All the Time, the Seattle group’s debut, that doesn’t come from one of these three influences. Still, it’s a pretty…
