Music

It’s ironic that Kan’Nal, a band of local worldbeaters steeped in Mayan mysticism, would preach a philosophy of peace, love and understanding. Lest we forget, the ancient Aztecs sacrificed prisoners of war on a colossal scale, removing and burning their still-beating hearts before tossing their bodies down the steps of…

Since he first stepped behind the decks at San Francisco’s warehouse parties nineteen years ago, Doc Martin has helped put house music on the map in the U.S. Having flourished during the heyday of the ’90s rave scene, Doc is a living throwback to that era and will always be…

If you rely on your eyes, you might not find the Nightingale house. In a neighborhood that’s rapidly becoming gentrified, where Novas on cinderblocks sit next to Volvo wagons and classic bungalows languish in the shadows of sterile new condos, the little white cottage is almost lost. But seek it…

We’ve been able to survive on, basically, what a dishwasher’s wage would be, which is more than enough for us,” says drummer Zach Hill of the experimental freak-rock duo Hella. “As long as we tour and stay creative and work and progress.” Hill is referring to himself and longtime collaborator…

“I’ve become what I said I’d never become,” says Trevor Pryce, laughing into the phone. “Yeah, a hipster. I have a Mohawk.” The VH1 exec on the other end wants a photo of 33Hz, the flagship act of Pryce’s Outlook Music Co. label; the network is slated to feature the…

Over the course of human evolution, the sight of blood has become something that induces revulsion instead of hunger. The men of Unsane, then, are unabashed throwbacks; Blood Run, the trio’s fifth full-length, is an orgiastic blast of pure noise that guzzles gore like some Paleolithic misanthrope. But it isn’t…

Bands today just can’t commit. Kiss released over a dozen platters before its members deployed the ol’ we’ve-stopped-painting-our-faces gimmick, whereas Mudvayne is using essentially the same stunt on CD number three. And while Kiss had Gene Simmons’s tongue to fall back on (the group’s first Maybelline-free recording was titled Lick…

With a soaring choral intro that erupted abruptly into erratic sprays of knuckle-blistering guitar, British Sea Power’s debut album, The Decline of British Sea Power, was anything but predictable. But Open Season, the English group’s anticipated followup, is exactly what you’d expect from a sophomore effort: a tamer, meeker, more…

Ladies and gentlemen, meet this year’s Killers. Although the two acts bear very little sonic kinship — aside from the fact that they’re both drawing upon influences that predate them by at least two decades — like its Vegas-bred counterparts in 2004, Bloc Party is riding the crest of one…

It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hear it. Melodic, atmospheric and decidedly unhip, Kite Operations mines the land previously trod by countless shoegazers before it and extracts a shimmering, eardrum-shattering ore of blissful indie pop. Opening with “A Wonder” — a (mostly) straightahead indie…

How beloved are Daft Punk’s Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter? So much so that some of their fans argue, in apparent seriousness, that the lads purposefully set out to make their new album second-rate in order to illustrate their theory that dehumanization is stripping society of its finest…

As a singular cohesive document, the Life Crew’s inaugural release falls short. It sounds like the disjointed effort of more than a dozen artists. Fortunately, that’s what its creators intended. Meant more as a sampler, the disc deftly showcases the individual talents of this hip-hop collective’s fourteen members. While each…

“I can’t stand that sloppy shit.” It was at the 15th Street Tavern that I was offered this opinion on music by a drunk, middle-aged devotee of Ronnie James Dio. I still don’t know what “that sloppy shit” is exactly — but whatever Dio Dude meant, he’d surely be pissed…

Jennifer Gentle is not the girl next door. With one ear pressed to Donovan’s Greatest Hits and the other to Elephant 6, she produces giddy, psychedelic pop that comes from a parallel universe in which the Partridge Family dropped acid and joined the circus. Disappointingly, the girl next door never…

At first, Mike Patton was merely the Sammy Haggar to Faith No More’s David Lee Roth equivalent. He produced now-pedestrian-but-groundbreaking-at-the-time rap-metal hybrid vocals, but he was always a dude, destined to go the way of Axl. Then he moved on to Mr. Bungle, where he showed a Zappa-like propensity for…

While Cincinnati is better known for five-alarm chili and a bungling football franchise, it’s also the unlikely home to Thee Shams, a garage-blues outfit less inspired by the banks of the Ohio River than by the muddy shores of the Mississippi Delta. As much in debt to maximum R&B’s founding…

Raw rock grooves, chant-based “vocal scraps,” heroic doses of organ-soaked psychedelia: Such are the trappings of Apes. The quixotic Washington, D.C., quartet has spent the last five years plumbing the murky swamp land bordered by Les Savy Fav, early Deep Purple and Rembrandt Pussyhorse-era Butthole Surfers. The result, as evidenced…

As Renaissance men go, Paul Miller, better known as DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid (after a William S. Burroughs character) may not be much of a scientist, but he’s definitely multi-talented enough for the polymath designation. Although musician, writer and theorist seem to be his favorite hats, sculptor, professor and…

Matt Ward has made a career of defying categorization, and this year’s Transistor Radio is no exception. At its heart is a love for lo-fi indie pop as well as its progenitors — third-album-era Velvet Underground, Brian Wilson (whose classic “You Still Believe in Me” gets a baroque instrumental treatment…

When Whiskeytown broke up, Ryan Adams’s eminently gifted guitar partner, Phil Wandscher, decided to take the low road. Now that Adams has become more of a pinup and media gadfly than a tunesmith, it’s up to Wandscher’s current group, Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter, to maintain the integrity and…

Christ, that Axl Rose is stupid. Guns N’ Roses was one of the most popular and entertaining hard-rock bands of the last two decades, yet Rose tore the original lineup apart for reasons that make about as much sense as the mainstream media’s obsession with Britney Spears’s womb. (Correct me…