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…
From small-town Missouri to headlining the Gothic Theatre, Nathaniel Rateliff and Joseph Pope of Born in the Flood have raised their watermark considerably over the last few years. After relocating to Denver for a brief spell of missionary work, the two flirted with shoegazer, blues and even Southern rock before…
Before he discovered house music and the rave/club scene, Chicago’s Bad Boy Bill was a hip-hop-based battle DJ. That experience as a turntablist has given him an edge that most dance-music DJs don’t have. Any track he plays becomes his own, as he applies battle-jock techniques — scratching and cutting…
Some reasons to get out and party: Quixote’s True Blue has finally reopened in its new home next door to Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom (2637 Welton Street); the grand-opening party on April 12 featured performances by members of Banyan, Particle and Fishbone. Since leaving its spot at 7 South Broadway in…
I have a rare disorder called offstage fright,” Scot Livingston confesses. “It’s much easier talking about stuff in front of strangers than it is one-on-one. If I were to admit to a capital crime or murder, it would probably be on stage, in front of a bunch of people I…
I’ve got this idea for a video,” says Craig Macintosh, “of me in the middle of the street taking a shit and picking my nose and pissing all over the place. It’s so important to do. I feel like I have to do that.” Macintosh has some issues with fame…
“No, sir, I can’t even play a freaking flute,” reveals Wayne Quigley. “And what’s that thing called — a recorder? My kids blow me away on the recorder.” Back in May 2003, Quigley — Big Q, as he’s known around town — didn’t have any experience with homegrown music, either…
Z-Trip has always been on some next-level shit. Mention mash-ups, and his name will invariably come up. While it’s debatable whether he was the first DJ to mate tracks from unlikely sources, he is definitely the best. Uneasy Listening Volume I, the widely bootlegged mix CD he did with DJ…
Cellos, dub shivers, disco lubrication, avant-garde detachment — sounds like a recipe for Arthur Russell’s revolutionary proto-house of the early ’80s. But it’s also a shopping list for the throbbing tones of Out Hud’s Let Us Never Speak of It Again. Sharing three members with funk-deconstructionist outfit !!!, the quintet…
Before some dickhead lawyered up, Caribou (Dan Snaith) used to be known as Manitoba, an artist whose debut, Up in Flames, sculpted the soft white noise of My Bloody Valentine into electronic songs with elaborate Escher-like architecture. The Milk of Human Kindness, the act’s latest effort, perpetually evokes construction analogies…
On 2001’s scattershot Faithfully, Evans played second diva to production heavyweights who yanked her from style to style until she lost her identity. The former Mrs. Biggie Smalls has plenty of name-brand help this time, too, but Lady is a cohesive package that proves there’s more to her than celebrity…
