With perennial collaborator Tobin Sprout, Robert Pollard presents his second full-length effort as Airport 5. Life Starts Here is the eighteenth overall installment in the Fading Captain series, a body of work that includes the busy Guided by Voices singer’s nonstop solo flights and side projects. Recorded in separate studios…

In the widely anthologized short story “Good Country People,” Flannery O’Conner tells the tale of an overeducated spinster with an artificial leg who tries to seduce a traveling Bible salesman. A self-declared atheist, she coaxes the seemingly innocent faith peddler up into a hayloft — only to discover that his…

Like Bob Hope or a common housefly, punk music outlived its usefulness in a hurry, subsisting on bland, discarded jokes and stale cheese. By the time the Sex Pistols called it quits in 1978, an isolated American youth was finally coming to grips with the budding romance of not caring…

Like St. Francis Xavier in a coonskin cap, Fruit Bats frontman Eric Johnson has a way with animals: For starters, dancing moths, honeybees, fireflies, mastadons, mountain goats, chestnut mares, poison frogs and bison herds are all over Echolocation. But while a mismatched menagerie inspires his sweetly rendered retreats from big-city…

These days, Tim Rutili is as busy as a one-armed monkey at a flea festival. He’s not only juggling parenthood and the planning of Califone’s three-week tour to the West coast and back, but also overseeing the operations of Perishable Records, a small, Chicago-based indie label that he co-owns with…

The members of Mushroomhead want everyone to know that they had the idea first: cluttering a stage in goofy masks to usher in the end times with mediocre metal. And while fans of Des Moines’s abrasive Slipknot howl from the balconies of hardcore injustice — accusing Mushroomhead of being a…

With so many alter egos and in-jokes flooding Negativland’s Universal Media Netweb (social critic Crosley Bendix, psychiatrist Dr. Oslo Norway and the smarmy Weatherman among them), keeping track of who’s who is more of a nuisance than a necessity. Core member Richard Lyons sometimes bullies the pulpit in drag as…

Seated in Domo — a local, rustic Japanese eatery that doesn’t believe in forks — Michael Serviolo studies his menu like a finicky working-class gourmand. He exalts the merits of green-lipped mussels over the lesser species of poultry, considers aloud how the distinct tang of lemongrass might accent the fire…

Belly up to the Marshall stack when the local heroes of Abdomen inflict structural damage to pop architecture on Friday, February 8, at the 15th Street Tavern. Guitarist Mike Jourgensen nails hummable hardcore to the wall with the effects-laden skill of a master carpenter. Measuring psychedelic speed-metal to fit the…

Tan, rested and cocky, Tommy Womack returned to Nashville from a Carnival cruise late last summer with a bounce in his step. “The world was wonderful,” he says. “I got a copy of the new Dylan album in advance that nobody else had. I just met Bill Wyman at a…

A brief entry in the 1974 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records cites the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum as the Worlds Most Closed Public Institution one that operated openly for only 47 days of its 34-year existence. Shuttered up after crowds gathered in Manhattans meat-packing district for a free…

The first New Order album in eight years finds the survivors of Joy Division banging their collective drum in yet another monochromatic burst of synthetic rapture. Not that Manchester’s most brooding band ever really suffered commercially from picking at the same scab — or from adhering to the same descending…

David Hollander has an enduring affinity for instrumental soundtrack music, especially from cop shows of the ’70s. With campy credits that include Kojak and Barnaby Jones, Hollander — whose DJ handle, Lil’ Earl, alludes to his early role on What’s Happening!!, where he played opposite a dancing gastropod called Rerun…

The year 2001 produced its share of catastrophes: major terrorist campaigns in D.C. and New York, a widespread anthrax scare — and J. Lo’s solo debut. Fortunately, there’s plenty worth remembering about the first official year of the new millennium, as artists of every genre proved that music still matters,…

Poor Yoko. Born into an elite Japanese banking family and heiress to John Lennon’s estate, rock’s most famous widow seems to have tried everything under the sun to cope with the trappings of wealth: high-rent seclusion, mink coats, primal-scream therapy, tarot cards, waging peace from the comfort of bed, catching…

While Julie Andrews twirled around the Swiss Alps as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s favorite singing fräulein, little Lord Bertrand Burgalat, the son of a minor government official, languished in Corsica. Forced to learn classical piano under the threat of constant Brie, he grew up to not only dazzle jet-setting Euro-hipsters, but…

While Bazooka Joe was being shipped off to die in ‘Nam, a sweetly sick kind of music called bubblegum oozed out of stateside AM radios like pink, candy-coated napalm. From 1967-1969, independent producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz supervised a revolving, New York-based crew of session players and professional jingle…

A former Lakers ball boy whose ever-growing musical credits include collaborations with Carlos Santana, Deltron 3030, Beck and Femi Kuta among others, Money Mark (who performs at Boulder’s Fox Theatre on Friday, September 21) serves up his third solo full-length album. Change Is Coming’s twelve highly accessible instrumentals blur the…

With an almost cheerful inability to differentiate between the ridiculous and the sublime, Moris Tepper somehow remains as focused as a bird of prey. At times his mind rests assuredly in a few of life’s less popular givens: Don’t trust anyone who burns incense; evil comes from the “big brain”;…

“I should not be making a living off of music,” declares Skerik, the mysteriously self-christened tenor saxophonist of Critters Buggin. “Because I can only play music that I like. For me, it’s not a job.” The old joke about free jazz (that it’s called “free jazz” because it’s worth every…

One day after the sad and grisly details of Kurt Cobain’s suicide first spread across the nation like a rolling blackout, Mudhoney — the legendary Seattle-based underground grunge band that gave neighboring Aberdeen’s Nirvana its first opening slot in the soggy Emerald City — found itself in the most unlikely…