Somewhere between the endearingly naive music of ’70s cartoons like Josie and the Pussycats and early Velvet Underground recordings lies Elf Power, which appears Tuesday, May 28, at the 15th Street Tavern with Masters of the Hemisphere. The band, based in Athens, Georgia, is closely associated with the Elephant 6…

The difficulty with keeping it real in punk lies in the danger of repetitiveness. That’s where bands like Sweden’s Hives come in. Singer Howlin’ Pelle Alqvist has got the squealing, hell-bound, late-adolescent shriek of Johnny Rotten before he went MTV, and the band grinds out a dozen or so songs…

Making babies and playing rock-and-roll music don’t really seem like compatible endeavors, even though the process of making babies is one of the genre’s most well-celebrated themes. Raising a child requires a certain settling of one’s more raucous instincts: How can you party till dawn in a nihilistic, depraved fever…

If your cheesy, green-beer-swilling, American version of Saint Paddy’s Day got a mohawk and a few tattoos, then did a fat line of blow along with its usual bucketfuls of Jameson, it would look a lot like Flogging Molly. This band, which appears Sunday, May 5, at the Ogden Theatre,…

David Bazan, aka Pedro the Lion, who performs Friday, April 26, at the Bluebird Theater, with Damien Jurado, Gathered in Song and TW Walsh, has been called many things: whiny, self-absorbed, full of “minor-league anxieties.” But the born-again Christian singer-songwriter has a gift for telling stories in an offhand, lo-fi…

With so much music out there, one of the hardest things for a band to do is find an original sound — so more power to those who try diligently to stand apart from everyone else. But there’s also something to be said for continuity, for not turning 180 degrees…

When Drag the River’s Jon Snodgrass describes an incident on a recent tour, it sounds a little bit like a David Lynch movie that was never made. During the last leg of the regional jaunt, a broken-down van was the catalyst for a nightmare freak show in a New Mexico…

The idea of artists overcoming adversity is a modern theme du jour, with dreary storylines custom-made for television documentaries. Yet it’s hard to imagine any comeback more unlikely than the one achieved by Steve Earle, who appears in a solo acoustic set at the Fox Theatre on Thursday, March 7…

There’s a deliciously distorted sound to the guitars in most of Dressy Bessy’s songs. It’s still sweet, with rich, grinding tones that are somehow warm and aggressive at the same time. It’s just twisted, like razors filtered through a candy sieve. Continuing in the same sugarcoated vein as Pink Hearts…

Discussions about Desaparecidos on music-oriented Web bulletin boards — virtual forums where serious fans can dissect their faves 24 hours a day — indicate that it takes some work to pronounce the band’s name. “Day-suh-par-eh-see-dohs,” offers one helpful user at audiogalaxy.com. But perhaps that’s part of the idea behind the…

Originally, Groundwork was a concert series built to raise money for a variety of sustainable, ongoing food projects around the world, including establishing orchards in Eritrea, producing natural honey in Armenia and building community-wide backyard livestock development in Sierra Leone. The group stayed true to its name by getting down…

The story was surely blown before it began. Over the telephone, Geoff Vaughan, contact person for the groove collective Vinyl, is asked if he can set up an interview with someone in the band for early the following week. There’s a long pause. Then this: “Well, I’m the bass player,…

Finally, a bridge that spans the sometimes mighty chasm between post-hardcore and more user-friendly rock. On its third full-length release, Chicago-area trio Land of the El Caminos has managed to carve a niche wherein singer/guitarist Dan Fanelli can belt out his raspy, half-howled vocals over tunes that snag themselves like…

You’ve got to love an album that begins with a song called “Bells of Saint Alcohol.” Davey VonBohlen’s matter-of-fact account of booze-as-career is somehow light and airy — or at least accepting, even reverent, of a way of life that is usually treated with more dreary concern and grimness. On…

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,…

Living in the land of 10,000 lakes seems to do strange things to people. Take Manplanet, for instance. Aside from assuming a name that aggressively sounds like a gay-sex Web site, each member of this Minnesota-based band once fearlessly donned a snug vinyl bodysuit for a photo shoot in a…

Pigface is: a) a deviant sexual practice akin to the “Cleveland Steamer”; b) the newest Denny’s breakfast special; or c) a loose-knit industrial-music collective based around former Ministry drummer Martin Atkins. Well, it’s mostly c), depending on what you’re into. The rotating cast that Atkins periodically assembles has included Frank…

There’s something immediately arresting about David Bazan’s vocals, though nothing particularly dramatic is going on. His words are almost always delivered in a slow, off-hand lope. Bazan sounds somewhat congested, as if he barely has the strength to form the words and tap out a somnolent rhythm with one drumstick…

What happened to rock music? Not the sagging, moldering corpses of Stevie Ray and Jimi, still propped up and sucked off on classic-rock radio. Just straightahead rock music like the Replacements or the Ramones, played with a certain fearlessness about trying new things. Answer: Carlos (Wednesday, November 21, at the…

Perry Farrell is a weird genius-prophet from another dimension — or maybe from the future. His creations are cunning experiments, forays outside of the rigid bounds of normal thought. Like a trickster of myth playing possum, he pretends to be part of just another band or rock show, beguiling us…

Warren Zevon once said, in response to an interviewer asking whether he was being ironic or sincere in a particular song: “With all due respect to Alanis Morissette, if you define that you’re being ironic, then you’re automatically not being ironic.” “Irony” is a word you can’t get away from…

The Waterboys’ first release in eight years crawls greasily out of the gates like a shiny-wet pale demon emerging from the sewer. On “Let it Happen,” the album’s opening track, Mike Scott’s skeletal vocals paint a nightmare vision of a Cimmerian cityscape, a Burroughs-esque journey in which he encounters all…